BRITISH COMMONWEALTH ArFAl.RS-N'o , 4

AFRICAN DILEMMAS

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Tms series is published under the auspices of the Royal Empire Society in order to provide a forum for the discussion of current questions relating to the British Co=onwealth and Empire. The views expressed are those of the respective authors, and not necessarily those of the Society.

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AFRICAN DILEMMAS

by

ELSPETH HUXLEY

LONGMANS .GREEN AND CO. LONDON NEW YORK TORONTO

LONG MANS, GREEN AND CO. LTD. 6 & 7 CUFFORD STREET, LONDON, \V. I

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First published 1948

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AFRICAN DILEMMAS

Two moons contest the tide of British policy in Africa. One is our need for a new world to cultivate, if not to conquer: a need sharpened by withdrawal from the East and by the

pinch of dollar famine. That moon pulls up the African shore a tide of British interest, money, skill, expectation.

Its rival sucks African hope and effort away from British mastery, as from all European hegemony. It gathers a tide of self-determination, of nationalism, which we ourselves blow for­ward with ever greater force to bring about se)f-rule, and with it our own impotence. So one tide drives us hard towards the continent and the other repels us. Are we going forward or pulling back? In the same year we have launched the groundnut scheme in Tanganyika and brought into being in Nigeria a con­stitution that gives Africans a majority in the legislature. Both are acclaimed as examples of progress, and each points in an opposite direction.

That is one of Africa's dilemmas, though one that lacks official recognition. No empire can ever have had a clearer political aim than ours: to hflnd over to the people of each colony, in the shortest possi ble time, the management, by democratic means, of their own affairs, and to remove ourselves from the controls-a policy that has been apfly described as "to saw off the branch we are sitting on." It is our hope that the emergent nations will remain as partners within the Commonwealth, but we do not try to make this a condition; the secession of Burma in 1947 was proof that the choice we offer is truly free.

A Policy of Self-Annihilation It is a strange policy, this, that aims at our own annihilation,

and one that has yet to be proved either workable or beneficial. Naturally, it is a fruit of experience: first the failure of force, in the circumstances of the time, to keep within our Empire a reluctant faction of emigrants to North America, second the unexpected success of voluntary abdication elsewhere. Australia, New Zealand, Canada, South Africa held together (if only just) round the nucleus of the Crown, and so the British Commonwealth, an unplanned achievement, came into being.

Our conscious aim is now to repeat that success in the altogether different circumstances of the Colonial Empire. We brought it off with some 15 millions of our own race, grouped in four continents; we are in course of applying it to some 50 million Africans, nearly all primitives, crowded into the fertile portions of a still half-savage land. This idea is bold and visionary, and so

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little based on experience or logic that we perhaps take its success too easily for granted. At least it would be prudent to recognise the differences between the two projects: in the Dominions a close affinity of race, tradition, custom, law, faith and ideas enshrined; in the colonies, divergency in all these matters, both between our­selves and the native peoples, and between the different groups of those in tutelage.

The Need for Unity There is little unity in the colonies, either between tribe and

tribe or between Bantu and Hamite, or Indian and African, or Moslem and pagan, or white settler and tribesman, or lawyer and peasant. Their peoples stumble through a twilit no man's land between loyalties, their faith in chief and tribe and clan 'shrunk or shattered, a new fealty to nation or party or dogma no more than embryonic.

Unity and loyalty are things we take for granted, but they are things of slow growth and patchy distribution, and yo u can no more make a country without them than bricks without clay. How can they be forced up in the time left to us in Africa? To what Caesar is the Benue fisherman, the Ashanti farmer, the Acholi herdsman to render his due, what star can the new kings follow? Yet, wi thout that Caesar and that star, how can countries divided, as most African colonies are, by deep clefts between races, between faiths, between traditions, hope to set up a stable, easy-running, tolerant and effective form of government? In the East will the English settler, the Indian trader and the preponderant African come amicably to terms, or, in the West, the Moslem Emir and the Ibo teacher, the town-dweller and the man of the bush?

It may be so, but we are surely rash to assume it as inevitable, at least without long and strenuous effort. A century of that belief in India was shattered at the last moment. Here in Africa, have we the elements from which to make a series of nations? And to make nations of a certain kind: not merely self-governing, but democratio? African kingdoms like the Hausa states, Ashanti and Buganda were as self-governing as anyone could wish centuries before the European irruption. But they are not what we bope to see on our withdrawal. Their people lived at the wbim of rulers whose slaves would flog to death a miscreant and execute one who had not grovelled flat enough before his master. Elsewhere, demo­cracy did exist-the elders' council, the age-grade's authority-but it was disparate, fragmentary and weak. We aim to leave whole countries with all the elaborate machinery of parliament, ministers, elections, local government and civil service ticking over, and all created from the void without precedent, tradition, or time for the rubbing away on the wheel of experience.

A formidable order, with time pressing on our heels. To remind us that unity is as shy as it is needful, we have Palestine's example-­and to remind us, also, that chaos lies close beneath the surface of

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authority. Palestine shows that our policy of self-rule can be a mockery without unity, in fact no policy at all. And then, to show that unity is not wholly a wild fancy, we think of Ceylon.

Ceylon has no unity either, though it has a preponderance of Sinhalese over Tamil, Burgher, European and all others, and a Sinhalese culture, tradition and tongue still vigorous and wise. And Buddl:tism is of all faiths the most tolerant. But Ceylon has minorities, racial and religious, and Ceylon has self-government, and in Ceylon-so far-it works . This new Dominion is, in fact, the first colony to step off the top tung of the ladder into inde­pendence, and she has done so with ease and goodwill all round, and of her own volition elected to owe allegiance to the English King. Ceylon is a beacon, a star, a pledge; it is her example, and not Palestine's, that others will aspire to follow.

Self-Rule and the Time Machine

It is the timing that is critical. Meeting, as one often may, with well-educated African judges and doctors and politicians, one can scarcely credit the rawness of their people, or remember that only half a century ago the continent lay still as it had lain since the Iron Age started, gripped harshly by slavery, superstition and savagery, meeting droughts with incantations, epidemics with sacri­fice, danger with charms, enemies with spears; ignorant still of letters, of wheels, of ploughs, of all human achievement beyond the narrow limits of the tribe. It is hard to realise this, and that within tbe lifetime of a middle-aged man Africa has leaped from sucb conditions into the panoply of legislative councils, courts of law, factory acts and editorials. (Nigeria carne under Britisb rule in 1900, Uganda in 1895.)

And for the first half at least of that half-century there was no thought of self-rule, but mucb of "indirect rule," a recognition of native kingdoms and rulers, provided they ruled witb Testraint, took advice and paid taxes. Indirect rule was at once economical in white man-power and preservative of African tradition, but as, on the one hand, the authority of chiefs and kings hardened, and, on the other, a new class of "educated men" came up from the" schools, it grew .Inadequate, because too rigid. Africans themselves began to complain (as they were now able to do) of the rulers' arbitrary powers and the impotence of the literate; and so indirect rule is being shaken up and rearranged as "local government," witb elected or part-elected councils encroacbing on the powers of hereditary rulers.

To-day's task is to link the chief-in-council, or whatever is the unit of local government, with the central machine, in which Africans are quickly gaining heavier representation (the Gold Coast and Nigeria both have African majorities in the legislature)-but not always tbose Africans best able to speak for their people. To strain tbe demagogue from the political brew is difficult, but it is

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being tried experimentally, for instance in Uganda, where a compli­cated pyramid has been contrived . At the base are the small local parish councils, each with a ntinor chief at the head, composed for the rest of men elected by their fellows at an open meeting by a count of heads. Next comes the rural district, with councils made up partly of ntinor chiefs and partly of delegates sent forward by a group of parish councils. The third course is the county, whose councils consist of a mixture of subordinate chiefs and, again, of delegates elected by the rural district councils.

The next stage is to taper off the pyramid to its peak, the Legis­lative Council, and this has been done after different fashions in several places, for instance in Nigeria, which has three Regional Councils made up partly of chiefs, who are in effect Government officials, and partly of men from village councils elected by the populace. Each Regional Council sends a number of its members to serve on the central Legislative Council. Thus it is possible for a man to go all the way from his village commune to the colonial parliament, being hoisted up at each stage by the approval of his fellows; and equally he cannot reach those heights, except in a few special cases, unless and unti l he has passed the test of public confidence at several levels. Thus are the men of straw to be weeded out-or that is the intention-and a direct link forged between tbe remotest village with its gathering of elders to squat in deliberation under a tree, and the central legislature assembled in its panelled hall in the capital city.

And now self-rule is appearing for the first time not as a distant ideal but as a close objective. It is true that only a few extremists seek to force in this generation a British withdrawal. These extremists are for the most part youngish, westernised men, not the rulers or the peasantry, who covet for tbemselves the power and spoils of office. It is pointed out sourly by Europeans that they would in all likelihood oppress and exploit their fellows far more thoroughly than any alien. That does not check their propagation of racialism and xenophobia.

It is here that the time factor comes in. These men, the nationalists, tire easily of assertions that Africans are as yet "unfit" to control their own affairs. In Nigeria they call for a climax within ten years. Yet in Nigeria only one person in thirty can read and write, even crudely. (Not that literacy is a gauge of knowledge, still less of common sense, but it is often so used, and is probably a prerequisite at least of the former.) There is, as we have said, no political unity. How would some 23 million peasants fare in the hands of a handful of town-bred traders and politicians as inexperienced as they are vain? Europeans whose lives are spent trying to better the peasants' lot shiver with appre­hension at the very idea. The peasant himself is busy with his crops, his family affairs, and in the main indifferent. But perhaps his son goes to school.

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EAST AFRICA ............... Railways

~Chief Air Routes

Education versus Magic There, the teachers' notions imperceptibly penetrate and per­

meate the boy's mind . Literate, he reads of follies and double­dealing; maybe he learns distrust. He will listen with more of his heart open to a black compatriot than to a white well-wisher. Here is the obstacle that the good intentions of all colonial govern­ments must somehow scramble over. To train people for self-rule needs the willing ear and open heart of the pupil. He must come at least half-way. And those who have talked much of their departure destroy the prospect of a long stay. This is the central question: can the people learn enough of self-rule, of democratic methods, of unity, of restraint, of toleration, of the economic facts of life, before tbey feel themselves too bold and too stroQg to endure for longer their imperfect teacher?

That is a political question. I t cannot be separated from the economic and social side of things. Pressed, as we now are, to show cause wby self-rule should not come into force to-morrow, or perhaps next week, we find ourselves forced back on the obvious : tbat freedom implies self-support, and that no one can make a sensible political decision about a matter he does not understand. In other words that men must build their country by work and trade before they aspire to govern it soundly; and that they need a modicum of education, some notion of the ways of tbe world around them, of civilised living, of the duties as well as the rights of a citizen, before they can oreate and sustain a living democracy.

How do African colonials come off in face of these tests? As yet, poorly. The even half-educated bob like corks on a sea of ignorant peasantry. Notions of citizensbip, of civilised values, are as yet crude and embryonic. Although change is swift and will be swifter, the notion of magic, like a reed deep-rooted in a river­bed, bows to tbe stream of progress and is not uprooted. In Mombasa, the largest seaport between Durban and Suez, an ancient town of Arab-shadowed sophisticates, the police had, in 1947, to disperse an angry crowd searching for a victim carried off, as they believed, by the Fire Brigade in order to pump out her blood in the service of a cu lt of ghostly vampires. This is a symptom to be considered no less than the visit of an African municipal officia l from Mombasa, in the same year, to South Wales to study local government.

Faced with such facts, the nationalist turns on his tutor and blames him for the sorry state of things. Why do so few children go to school? Why does the stream of scholars become a trickle when it reaches secondary schools? Where is compulsory free education? Why has mass literacy not put ignorance to flight? Why are so many Africans so poor, so badly fed, so worm-infested, so underpaid, so malarial, so inert? Who can be blamed qut the rulers, the responsible ones?

The European retort is bleak and simple. Rome was no( built in a day, nor Africa lifted in half a century from savagery to the

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still precarious level reached so painfully in Europe after two thousand years of effort-even allowing for the speeding-up of history's pace. And above all there is the question of means. How educate all the children without money to build schools and pay teachers? How create hospitals, clinics, clean water supplies, roads, houses, or wages high enough to enable families to live in Western fashion, without revenue? And where are the springs of reven ue save in the wealth of the country-production, trade?

And so we come back to the plain matter of bread and butter­or just bread. The old picture of Africa as an Eldorado has given way to a drearier one of a continent of poverty. Yet tropical Africa has good resources: copper in Rhodesia, tin and coal in Nigeria, diamonds and gold in Tanganyika, and so forth. Less readily tapped but still valuable are forests in the west, cattle in the east, and plantation crops grown for eJ(port as, in the east, sisal and tea and coffee, and in the west cocoa, the staple peasant industry of the Gold Coast (now threatened by the spread of a disease), palm oil, groundnuts. And then there are resources unexploited: valleys yet to be irrigated, swamps to be cultivated, bush to be cleared, waterfalls to be harnessed, surveys to be made.

The Poverty of Africa \ Why, then, is Africa poor-or, more correctly, why are Africans.

poor? Partly, no doubt, for lack of exploitation ("the action of turning to account"), certainly not for excess of it; because the balance of risks and profits was unattractive to "the City"; but partly because there was no sense in opening new sources at a time when coffee was used for firing locomotives and millions paid to farmers in America for not planting crops and not rearing beasts. And of the 50 years of European rule in Africa, about ten have been devoted to world wars and another eight or ten to world slumps.

But there are deeper reas.ons than mere inaction. These lie embedded in African society and its response to the new needs forced upon it by the inrush ofWesternism. Leaving aside minerals and forests, which cim be exploited only by alien capital and skill, colonial Africa, as we know, is a land of peasant farmers and herdsmen; of families living on and by the land or on and by their cattle. .

The unit is and was the family, but the family was at once enfolded and regulated by the tribe. The chief, or it might be the elders, bad authority in matters of land. They controlled inherit­ance, tenancy, disposal, sometimes even the order of cropping. The system was feudal, tribal chiefs and elders playing the part of medieval barons; and between man and nature a fine balance was kept. Man's tendency to multiply was held in check by famines, which came often, by epidemics, by inter-tribal wars and slavers' forays, and by the general hazards of primitive life. As with man, so with his livestock; disease, beasts of prey and hnnger

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limited his herds to a size congenial to the pastures they grazed over. The purpose of cultivation was merely to grow enough to eat.

And so arose a rough-and-ready system of farming which met the needs of the people who lived by it. It was nomadic: the cultivator moved on from place to place no less than the herdsman, leaving tbe land to slow recuperation. And so (save in parts of West Africa) no permanent settlements, no towns, arose. Yet every tribe or clan, like a bird in the nesting season, bad its feeding ground.

For centuries these customs served. Tbey serve no longer tbe new needs. That is the crux.

Shrinking Land: Expanding Population Men aim now not merely to grow food enough to eat but food

to sell, for they need money. So they must grow more; but they lack skill and tools to do so. Like all peasants, they cling to old way;; of doi ng things, yet are not content with old rewards. Often tbeir plots are too small to farm properly, above all to allow the soil to rest under grass . Families of fifteen or twenty try to wring a.. living off plots of two or three acres. It is impossible. They fl ug and squeeze the land, and the land responds in shrinking yields. People grow poorer instead of richer, worse fed instead of better. Tn west and in east yields are dropping, land falling away.

A t the same time tbe balance between man and na tu re has been wrecked. Western science controls epidemics and steadily pushes down rates of infant mortality. The experience of a Mission in Kenya is perhaps typical. Two groups of women were taken: old timers in skin~ and wire ornaments, and the wives of educated Mission aQllerents. In both groups the average number of childbirths and iniscarriages was the same, about eleven; the first group reared to maturity between two and three infants, the second group seven or eight. Hitberto Western administration has been able to prevent famines by importing grain. To-day there are whole regions which would be depopulated in a season were not grain from other countries or regions distributed, year after year, by the Government to keep the people alive.

Records are so sketcby tbat estimates of popUlation changes for wbole countries are, and must be, largely guesswork. Yet samples and censuses give enough substance to this guesswork to make it almost certain that the population of colonial Africa is on the verge of one of tbose tremendous upsurgings that overtake populations from time to time. (Our own, for instance, which rose from about nine millions after the Napoleonic Wars to over 45 millions in a century; or Java's, wbich in about the same time increased from an estimated four to over 40 millions.) The uncal­culated may intervene, of course; but at present it looks as if new drugs to control malaria and venereal disease, tbe spread of hygiene, and a further drop in infant mortality will cause cautious official figures to be exceeded. And these are startling enough. In East

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Africa a population of some 14 millions may rise to 20 millions by 1956, to over 30 millions before those of us who are middle-aged are dead. In Nigeria the rise may be as steep: 23 millions to-day, over 40 millions in our lifetime.

The more the merrier, one might say. Did not the rise of our own population concide with Britain's greatest period of material prosperity and might? But then we were not a nation of peasants. It coincided also with the industrial revolution.

People multiply; land does not. No more acres are coming into existence. On the contrary, many are disappearing from the comity of fertile acres-being written off. Where pressure is greatest land is dying before our eyes, turning into desert. At best, the type of farming is soil-exhausting, not conservative.

This dilemma presses hardest in the east, where most of the soil is poorer-at any rate patchier-and rainfall more fickle. It is coming in the west, for instance in eastern Nigeria, where the Ibo swell in numbers and press more heavily on their fully-cultivated land. It is, perhaps, the greatest of all the material dilemmas of Africa.

What can be done? What has been done in other countries Two things, generally combined: emigration and industrialisation. Will these be Africa's· salvation?

Can Africa Industrialise? Industry came humbly to Europe through handicrafts and village

craftsmen-the smith, the wheelwright, the brick-burner-and there is no reason why it should not . do the -same in A.frica. But in Africa the artisan is normally a peasant · still, and clings to his rights over his land, his ·by inheritance. It is :an old story-the mind of man changes slowly, his circumstances fast. And "educa­tion" in Africa has meant, and often still means, only literacy, leading to the typewriter and the coDar-and-tie. For every hundred youths taught the names of the kings of England, perhaps only one has mastered a trade that will give him a decent living and help his people to save their land.

The pace of change is now too hot for the vil1age craftsman alone to build a bridge between peasantry and industry. Bigger schemes are needed to draw thousands off the land and to bring opportunities to peasants. Will they work? Industry is exacting. It cal1s for capital, power, steel, skill, markets.

Capital we can doubtless bring. Cheap power is harder. There is coal both east and west, but It must be carried expensively over long distances. In the east, hopeful eyes watch the damming of the White Nile near Jinja that may create power for sale at a tenth of a penny a unit. Why should this power not drive mules and looms to turn Uganda's raw cotton into cheap cloth? (At present that cotton goes to India and comes back as piece goods; yet mills make textiles in the Belgian Congo and in Southern Rhodesia.) There is copper in western Uganda and iron ore on

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the slopes of Mt. Elgon. The outlines of an industrial centre are there; vision, courage, drive and persev\rance are now the qualities needed.

Skill; markets. There is no skill. That can perhaps be learnt, but it takes time, maybe two generations. Time, and the driving need that uproots men and plants them out in factories . Markets are even more difficult. What matters here is not heads but pocket, and pockets are very narrow. The yearly cash income of a peasant family in eastern Nigeria has been calculated at 56s., and at some­where near the same figure in western Kenya. That leaves little enough to spend on manufactures. Such lack of spending power may smother young industries, which must face also remorseless competition from big concerns of long standing overseas.

Hopeless, some say; yet every peasant country turning to industry has had to face this same obstacle. The way out is that industries themselves create wealth as they grow, and so raise spending power. Kenya has started a few small factories-foot­wear, woollens, pottery, chemicals-which pay the men three or four times more than they can earn on their own plots of land. So the men are better spenders. Thus can a country pull itself up by its own bootstraps-a slow heave. Everything that can be done to hasten it needs to be done, and nor- only by governments, for the whole future prosperity of tropical Africa ultimately rests very largely on the ability of peoples and rulers to get together to develop industries, great and small, starting not the day after to-morrow or even to-morrow, but to-day.

The Will to Work Behind all this lies another question, not African on ly: is the

ordinary man ready to work harder-much harder-in order to produce more? This problem is even greater than ours in Britain, for ounput in Africa is beyond comparison lower. We trunk our hours here now are short, but theirs are shorter. (An average on Tanganyika's sisal plantations, for instance, of 23 a week.) We · tbink our pace slow, but tbeirs is slower. We think absenteeism high, but tbeirs is infinitely higher, only seldom regarded as such; wben a man has worked for six montbs or a year he will take half a year at horne to see to his affairs, or vanish for several years at a time and forget all his skill.

When men are working for themselves, as most still do, the pace is no brisker. A group of smallholders at a training school in Kenya proved, not on paper but by doing it, that on six acres properly farmed a man and his wife could live well and make besides a cash surplus of some £20 a year-little enough, perhaps,. but ten times tbe average for tbe district. Tbat was by workmg an eight-hour day. The average worked in tbose parts by ordinary peasants, however, is about five hours a day. On that, they cannot make a cash surplus. The notion of steady, bard, daily work, year in year out, is utterly foreign. Will it take root in the tropIcs ?--

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__ Rai/ways ~ Chief Air Routes

~ Land over 5. 000 {t

WEST AFRICA WOO ,0 leo 4:,.JOOM IL£S

Time and time again the African has shown that he would rather work less and make less' than put out the extra effo rt needed for extra reward.

Yet Africans well-fed, cleansed of disease and (this should not be forgotten) closely supervised, have proved themselves as ener­getic as the next man; in the Army, for instance, and on certain estates. Better feeding might work wonders-and that brings us back to the land. At present, in crowded regions, nutrition is worse, not better, than it was twenty years ago. While employers of labour may be able to feed their men 'on rations far more generous tban those of miners in Britain-and this they can do only if the land keeps up its productivity-the great majority of Africans are self-supporting and self-employed, and no amount of government regulations will add a single ounce of protein to their dinner.

Better feeding has been proved beyond question to lead to a better day's work, but not always-only when tbe will to work is tbere. Tbat may be a hard thing to manufacture in a soft, hot, enervating climate. And it may be tbat factors little understood have an importance far greater than we recognise : the cbild's upbringing, for instance. One of tbe few, lone, interrupted pieces of research on African psychology, conducted in Northern Rhodesia, suggested that tbe way in which children are reared (and this bas much in common from one side of the continent to the otber), and in particular the lack of routine and over-indulgence in tbe first years and the sudden break wben the child is weaned, creates many of the attributes sometimes spoken of as typically African: lack of staying power, fecklessness, that happy-go-lucky, generous fatalism so attractive in a companion and so inhibiting to efficiency. If such is tbe case, and it is one of many theories, we may have to wait for the new African until tbe new mother has emerged, and that will be a long time, for the education of girls has lagged (and still lags) far behind that of boys, altbough it is the more important; and even wben it eJtists, is sometimes of a questionable kind. Only recently an African Government cut out domestic science in girls' secondary schools to make way for geometry.

Answers to this question of how to create a will to work harder are no more than guesses, crucial as the matter is to the shape of the future; it is important to realise that we do not even know, as yet, whether it can be answered at all. Certainly most Africans (tbough not all) want the outward benefits of civi lisation : better houses, finer clothes, literacy, European food, the status of an "educated man"; but as yet many have not counted the cost, and we cannot be sure that tbey will be willing to pay when it is brought borne to them in full . For he who would be civilised, even outwardly, must give as well as receive. If Africans are t<;> be freed fro m hookworm, illiteracy and black magic, tbey must give up also the dance after harvest, . tlie bride-price bargaining, the day-long beer-drink under tbe tree. And on a hot afternoon in the tropics an eight-hour day seems more foolish than virtuous.

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Like all men everywhere, Africans would like to have their cake and eat it, and the education we have dispensed does not seem to have bf0ught home the diffioulties. Exhortation seems almost our only weapon; yet African parsnips are no more easily buttered tban any otbers. Honesty and expediency both demand tbat the price of progress should be more plainly marked, and if it appears tbat Africans prefer to withbold full payment, tben a cheaper article must be offered-less progress at a slower rate, and a long postponement of self-rule.

African Colonisation Inside Africa So much for industry; next, briefly, for the second of the two

linked solutions of the Malthusian crisis of over-population in relation to food supplies. In the nineteenth century, emigrants in their millions poured across the seas fwm fecund Britain. Before tbe war, Java kept its population fairLy constant by the yearly emigration of 80,000 to 100,000 souls to the outer islands. To-day no continents or islands call for Negro or Bantu inunigrants. So emigration must be as it were internal, to new settlements within colonial Africa.

This, of course, cannot go on forever, but luckily tbere is still room for bunched-up populations to expand. This is so espeoially in East Africa, where the people are so closely bound to their live­stock tbat the tsetse-fly, which exists also in the west, has kept large stretches of country virtually uninhabited. It is a sad fact, and a measure of the light Western hold on Africa, that in spite of aU tbe efforts of scientists and governments, tsetse-fly has greatly widened its bounds in the last quarter-century, and has never spread faster tban it is doing to-day. Perhaps seven-eighths of Tanganyika and three-quarters of Uganda are fly-infested. It is in tbese regions, in tbe east, that Africa's new empire lies. In the west tbere is still room for piecemeal expansion, but the slack is sbortening, the pressure mounting up.

And in the east there are many obstacles to expansion: lack of water, heavy cost of bush-clearing, reluctance of Africans to play the part of pioneers, artificial inter-colonial boundaries . Expert opinion believes that the wate, difficulty can probably be solved by water-boring and, more important, by making dams. These need a great deal of money and labour, and both are short. Experiments are being made; in Tanganyika, for instance, Colonial Development and Welfare money (the £120,000,000 present from British taxpayers to all the colonies) is financing dam-building and bush-clearing in tsetse-infected parts of overcrowded Sukumaland, . near Lake Victoria, in the belief that the lure of fresh grazing will bring stock-owners to the spot and that, once there, they will hold tbe country against tsetse counter-attaoks.

The Peasant and the Bulldozer Now high hopes are fixed on the new technique of clearing

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land mechanically which is one of the by-products of war in the Pacific. This is the technique ofthe "groundnutters" in Tanganyika, seeking relief in one of the waste places of tbe earth for tbe world's fat shortage. If three million acres of tough bush can be flattened by bulldozers and converted tanks and put under crops, and kept under them by scientific methods of farming, then a way is opened for the temporary evasion, at least, of Africa's fiercest dilemma: a way to win from the dead band of the bush new land, and to use it to feed people. Those people, in this instance, are in Europe, but other scbemes may follow, and have indeed been planned in detail in Uganda, to use the same tecbnique to grow food for people in Africa, if-and it is a big if-the economics can be mastered. Europe can pay for its ground nuts in tbe tbings needed by Africa­macbinery, locomotives, finished articles of all kinds. But if Africans are to eat the groundnuts, or the millet, the beans, the maize, whatever tbe crop may be, how are they to pay for it? How can all the expensive machinery-and mechanised bush-clearing is fantastically expensive-be bought and paid for if tbe project is to be one merely of large-scale subsistence farming, of peasant production mechanised and enormously inflated?

This is a question not yet answered, indeed as yet barely posed. Tbe groundnut scheme is the biggest event, economically, in Africa since the first railways, for it demonstrates a new technique; wbat will be needed next will be to graft technique on to the economic stock of peasant production. Tbose who grasped the truth tbat a modern state equipped with even the simplest social services and a heavy superstructure of administration cannot be built on a basis of peasantry, have for years spoken of collective farms, co­operatives, a controlled and scientific met bod of farming, even at the cost of its odious implications of state dictatorship, as the only way to avoid disaster. Here is a form of state-financed, state­managed farming on triaL

Sucb enterprises, and the very phrase "collective farming," are under a cloud to-day because of the political company they keep. Yet all that happens east of the iron curtain is not inimical. Russia had the same problem, drastically to raise the productivity ' of millions of backward people and to balance farming with industry, and sti ll has it to-day in Eastern Europe. If tbe method was applied brutally, that condemns the doer rather than tbe deed. Wbether it will in fact be possible to substitute persuasion for brute force is another of Africa's dilemmas. If not, tben we sball fail, for we are committed to persuasion. The obstacles are indeed intimidating, but tbe art of persuasion has not yet been given a fair and vigorous trial. As with other arts, tbe intermittent dabbling of amateurs is insufficient; it is time, and more than time, to call upon the steady performance of the professional. .

To succeed with persuasion, we must have African leaders on our side. That is indispensable. And so we come back in a circle to politics again, in its widest sense, proving that there is no problem

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in Africa that is not part of some other problem, all are intertwined, nothing can be treated in isolation.

Africa Hesitant Are they on our side or arc they not? Both in east and west

it is easy to feel that they are not. Politicians make rabid speeches, the free press takes often a hectoring, embittexed tone whose very injustice begins to poison alike the white man's regard for Africans (feeling these vipers bite his bosom) and the half-educated, half-astir African's trust in Europeans. Yet behind these ranting figures stands an infinitely larger, quieter, steadier body of Africans who work honestly and often in the face of embarrassment or even threats to fmther policies which they be1ieve to be in their interests and ours: native chiefs, headmen, clerks, teachers, dispensers, doctors, instructors, secretaries and men of every kind, from kings and emirs to orderlies and road foremen. The bulk of native leaders, though not uncritical, is still on our side, which they identify with their own, and much of the futnre lies in their hands.

That is not the whole answer, however. One must enquire also which way the tide is running. No one can be sure of the answer there. The younger generation is less certain, more bemused, than the old. As a symptom, neve. has contempt for the law (which perhaps by its stupidities has courted this) been so brazen, and disregard for others' rights. And never have such persuasive sirens sung to the young chartless mariners songs of power and easy wealth. Most of the songs are home-made, but a few are no doubt composed by Britain's enemies for the indoc­trination of comrade sirens, and these perhaps have the catchiest tunes.

So there is no cause for complacency-much the reverse. We need to capture the imagination, the enthusiasm, the faith of the younger generation, or all our good intentions will pave the road to a new hell.

For fifty years and more the Christian Missions have been tryi ng, and trying hard, to replace the old animist beliefs, which have so little stamina, by Christianity. They have by no means failed, since the Christian faith, in all countries and ages, has been caviare for the few, and there are African Christians to-day with characters as fine as any in what is left of Christendom. But what the Missions have by and large failed to do is to create the sort of Christian society that once existed in Emope, where all agreed to honour the ethical standards of the faith even if all did not accept its doctrines. By and large Christianity, though it has made con­siderable dents, has bounded off the tough hide of Africa-so apparently pliant, in truth so stubborn.

The Need for Faith The need remains : the need for a faith, a flame, a star, lest all

our high intentions and hard work create only a vacuum in the 19

heart of the African. Indeed, we have considered too little the African heart, and many perhaps think it sentimental to use such terms. In the age of planned economies, committees, schedules and memoranda the heart is lost, it does not fit into the file. We have ignored the heart, indeed our outlook seems to grow ever-more materialistic, and the modern thesis to be that literacy, hygiene and acquaintance with trade unions and co-operatives will of themselves transform Africans, newly freed from ignorance and superstition, into good citizens of a progressive state.

And here, perhaps, lies the hardest of all African dilemmas: whether the rulers can inspire the ruled with that urge, at once fiery and resolute, to master their surroundings, to remake them­selves and their world on a loftier pattern, without which no nation can be born. History suggests that this can be done, if at all, only through the power of leadership, the engine of all advance. Leadership is impotent without trust, and trust means love; and that is an affair of the heart.

Those who knew Africa during the first half of our half-century of rule affirm that trust then flowered; it was in fact the trust, indeed the love, so widely felt between white and black that sweet­ened the white man's struggle with sickness, isolation and discomfort that would otherwise have disheartened him. And it is of the decline of this trust, this love, tha t they are thinking when they tell you that the golden days in Africa are over. The pattern then was simple, the just master and the faithful man. On both sides there were derelictions, but the aim was clear. That simplicity has vanished; the new pattern is at once more clouded and harder to follow; to be master or man is a great deal easier than to be colleagues of different races pursuing, perhaps, contradictory ideas. The task of the present is to build a new relation between white and black as happy as the old, but on a fresh foundation.

A Focus of Loyalty One may question whether it is enough to talk of partnership,

or even to act on it. All men a~e partners, but a fact so widely proclaimed by all spirituallead~s has made as yet very little prac-· tical impression. Partners in what, and for what purpose? We need a focus of loyalty, a feeling of belonging, a thing to strive for and to cherish-family, clan, tribe, class, society, nation and its head, the ancestor or the king-emperor. What are Africans offered? Is the Commonwealth not too vast, too amorphous and impersonal, the lUng too remote? The Romans did better; they made citizenship a high honour, the Emperor a god. The Roman­ised Briton, the educated native of the day, was loyal to the empire because it stood for all that was civil, a light in the darkness, and to be of it and in it was his greatest pride. Long before the legi'ins went he knew them as his bulwark against the barbarism that in fact engulfed him, and rumours of their imminent withdrawal set an anxious deputation of Britain's natives on the road to Rome

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to beg for their continuance. Deputations to London rather demand the withdrawal than the presence of the British substitute for legions.

Where does the difference lie? Ancient Briton and modern African shared the belief that on entering the magic circle of educa­tion they were bettering themselves and putting away savage things, but tbe Briton was perhaps the greater realist and the Roman bad a greater pride, and was therefore better able to spread it. The Briton never thought that a small island on the ontskirts of civil­isation could sustain itself alone, he realised that chaos waited behind the Wall and the North Sea, and he knew that higher honours were to be won within the Emperor's service than outside it. That service demanded full loyalty. Death punished dere­liction, but for the good servant tbere were no barriers of race or birth anywhere in the civilised world.

The citizen of our Commonwealth enjoys many of the same rights, and others that the highest Roman never knew; but the pomp, the glory and tbe certainty are missing. He laok.s the spectacle of the triumpb, tbe glitter of the legions, the sense of might, the spiritual meaning of Rome. We who kill the slave­raid, the juju, the leopard-cult, tbe human sacrifice and even, so often. the dance of the warriors, seem only to have the school band and the information room, the lat6ne-drive and tbe tax exemption [orm, to offer in return. Ours seems at times a drab and half­apOlogetic empire that we only half-believe in ourselves. Life to-day in the villages lacks colour and drama, the people are in danger of starvation of tbe soul.

The clue, perhaps, lies here, at tbe centre. Do we ourselves believe in what we are trying to spread in Africa~in something beyond sanitation, elections, mass literacy and trade unions? If not, dressing up will serve us little. If we do, our task [s to know more clearly what it is we seek to propagate and then so to fire the minds of Africans, so to strike sparks from their souls, that their own leaders will take things into their own bands and talk less of negative self-government, which may yet be seen as a reactionary ideal, and more of a positive alliance witb us, and not against us, to raise tbe mind and soul as well as the body of the African by bard work, honesty, faith and brotherhood to a level where the best may become good citizens and servants of the Commonwealtb, and through it of the world.

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SOME FIGURES ABOUT THE AFRICAN COLONIES

Area (in sq. miles)

Population Composition of Legis/at;ve (in thousands) Council

British 58,000 700 Under military administration at present. Somalil.nd

Gambia 4,068 225

Gold Coast 91,843 4,095

'K~nya 219,730 3,985

Nigeria 372,599 20,477 (including (including

British British Cameroons) Cameroons)

Northern 284,745 1,654 Rhodesia

Ny.saland 47,949 2,183

Sierra 27,929 1,768 Leone

Tanganyika 360,000 5,500

Uganda 93,981 3,957

Zanzibar 1,020 250

Governor, 3 ex-officio members, 3 nomin­ated offidal members, 6 nominated un­official members, 1 elected member.*

Govemor as President, 6 ex-officio members, 18 elected members (9 representing the Colony, 4 Ashanti and 5 the Municipalities), 6 nominated members. * Government has 5 ex-officio members and 10 nominated. Unofficial members: 17 elected (II Europeans, 5 Indians (2 Mus­lims, 3 Hindus), I Arab), 5 Nominated (\ Arab, 4 Africans). Speaker (unofficial).

-Governor as President, 13 ex-officio mem­bers, 3 nominated official members, 24 nominated unofficial members, 4 elected members.*

6 ex-officio members, 3 nominated official members, 4 nominated unofficial members representing Africans (of whom 2 are Africans), 10 elected members. Speaker.

Governor as President, 6 official members, including the 3 ex-officio members of Executive Council, 6 nominated unofficial members: 5 are selected by Convention of Associations, 6th is nominated by Governor to represent native interests.

Governor as President, II official members, 3 elected unofficial members, not more than 7 nominated unofficial members, of whom 3 shall be Paramount Chiefs. (Constitu­tional amendments (including African majority) lInder consideration, 1948.)

Governor as President. 15 official members, 14 unofficial (7 Europeans, 3 Indians, 4 Africans).

Governor as President, 10 official members, 10 unofficial memben; (3 Europeans, 4 Africans, 3 Indians).

British Resident as President, 4 ex-officio members, 4 official members, 7 unofficial members (1 European, 3 Arabs, 2 Indians, I African).

• African majority in Legislative Council.

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