THE HIGHLANDS OF EAST AFRICA
"Colour" is already the dominant question at Nairobi. "We mean to make
East Africa a white man's country," cries, in strident tones, the
Colonists' Association on every occasion. Truly a respectable and
impressive policy; but one which seems, at first sight, rather
difficult to achieve in a land where there are, so far, fewer than two
thousand five hundred whites and more than four million black
aboriginals. Can East Africa ever become a white man's country? Can
even the Highlands, with their cool and buoyant breezes and temperate,
unchanging climate, become a white man's country? Never, certainly, in
the sense that Canada, or, indeed, the United Kingdom, are white men's
countries--that is to say, countries inhabited wholly by white people
and subsisting upon an economic basis of white unskilled labour.
It is scarcely worth while even to imagine the Highlands of East
Africa denuded of their native inhabitants and occupied solely by
Europeans. Such an idea is utterly impossible. Whatever may be the
increase in the white population in the future, it is safe to say that
it will be far more than counter-balanced by the multiplication of the
natives, as they are guarded against famine and prevented from civil
war. But were such a solution possible, it would be almost the last
thing in the world desired by those who clamour for "a white man's
country." For observe it is not against the black aboriginal that the
prejudices and interests of the white settler or trader are arrayed.
The African, it is conceded, is welcome to stay in his own country. No
economic competition has yet arisen or is likely to arise between him
and the new-comers. Their spheres of activity lie wholly apart, for
the white man absolutely refuses to do black man's work; not for that
harsh toil does he exile himself from the land of his birth; while the
native could not, in his present state of development, displace the
white man in skilled employments and the superintendence and the
organization of industry--even if he would--and nothing is farther
from his ambitions.
It is the brown man who is the rival. The European has neither the
wish nor the power to constitute a white proletariat in countries like
East Africa. In his view the blacks should be the private soldiers of
the army, but the non-commissioned officers and the commanders must be
white. This should not be dismissed as a mere assertion of racial
arrogance. It is an obstinate fact. It is already a grave defect for a
community to found itself upon the manual labour of an inferior race,
and many are the complications and perils that spring therefrom. But
what of the second storey? If there is to be any kind of white society
dwelling together year after year within the standards of life and
comfort to which Europeans have universally been accustomed to aspire,
and largely to attain, this middle stage in the economic system must
provide that white society with the means of earning--as professional
men, as planters, merchants, traders, farmers, bankers, overseers,
contractors, builders, engineers, accountants, clerks--a living for
themselves and their families. And here strikes in the Asiatic. In
every single employment of this class, his power of subsisting upon a
few shillings a month, his industry, his thrift, his sharp business
aptitudes give him the economic superiority, and if economic
superiority is to be the final rule--as it has never been and never
will be in the history of the world--there is not a single employment
of this middle class, from which he will not, to a very large extent,
clear the white man, as surely and as remorselessly as the brown rat
extirpated the black from British soil.
Then what remains? What sort of social organizations shall we be
building up with so much thought and labour in these new lands under
the British Crown? There is already no white working class. There is
to be no white middle class. Room is left only for the capitalist
_pure and simple_--if one may so describe him. A vast army of African
labourers, officered by educated Indians or Chinese, and directed by a
few individuals of diverse nationalities employing cosmopolitan
capital--that is the nightmare which haunts the white population of
South Africa, and at which what there is of a white population in East
Africa is already shrieking vigorously.
Yet hear the other side. How stands the claim of the British Indian?
His rights as a human being, his rights as a British subject, are
equally engaged. It was the Sikh soldier who bore an honourable part
in the conquest and pacification of these East African countries. It
is the Indian trader who, penetrating and maintaining himself in all
sorts of places to which no white man would go or in which no white
man could earn a living, has more than any one else developed the early
beginnings of trade and opened up the first slender means of
communication. It was by Indian labour that the one vital railway on
which everything else depends was constructed. It is the Indian banker
who supplies perhaps the larger part of the capital yet available for
business and enterprise, and to whom the white settlers have not
hesitated to recur for financial aid. The Indian was here long before
the first British official. He may point to as many generations of
useful industry on the coast and inland as the white settlers--especially
the most recently-arrived contingents from South Africa (the loudest
against him of all)--can count years of residence. Is it possible for
any Government with a scrap of respect for honest dealing between man
and man, to embark upon a policy of deliberately squeezing out the
native of India from regions in which he has established himself under
every security of public faith? Most of all must we ask, is such a
policy possible to the Government which bears sway over three hundred
millions of our Indian Empire?
We are in presence of one of those apparently hopeless antagonisms of
interests which baffle and dispirit all who are concerned in their
adjustment. And these questions are not confined to East Africa or to
South Africa. A whole series of new problems has arisen, and will grow
graver and larger as the immediate history of the British Empire
unfolds. They erect themselves upon a field almost wholly unstudied,
and familiar only by the prejudices which in every direction obstruct
movement and view. The entry of the Asiatic as labourer, trader, and
capitalist into competition in industry and enterprise not only
_with_, but _in_, the Western world is a new fact of first importance.
Cheap, swift, easy means of communication, the establishment of peace
and order over land and sea, the ever-growing inter-dependence of all
men and all countries upon one another, have given wings to Asiatic
commercial ambition and rendered Asiatic manual labour fluid, as it
has never before been fluid since the beginning of things.
Unless these new elements in the economic life of mankind can be
scientifically and harmoniously controlled and assimilated, great and
novel dangers menace alike the Asiatic and the European he supplants.
On the one hand we see the possible exploitation under various
unhealthy conditions of immense masses of Asiatic labour, to the moral
injury of the employer and to the degradation and suffering of the
employed; on the other the overturn of the standards of living
laboriously achieved or long obstinately battled for among Europeans.
Superadded to these we must foresee the confusion of blood, of
manners, of morals, amounting, where operative upon any extensive
scale, almost to the disintegration of the existing order of society.
And behind--very close behind--lie the appeals to force, by mobs or
Empires, to decide in a brutal fashion the brutal question which of
two sets of irreconcilable interests shall prevail. It is not easy to
measure the degree of political instability that will be introduced
into international relations, when the subjects of a powerful
military and naval State are continually exposed to penal legislation
and open violence, and into private life when the white artisan is
invited to acquiesce in his own extinction, in virtue of laws which he
himself controls, by a competitor whom, he believes, he could strike
down with his hands.
Yet the Asiatic, and here I also include the African native, has
immense services to render and energies to contribute to the happiness
and material progress of the world. There are spacious lands whose
promise can never be realized, there are unnumbered harvests which can
never be garnered, without his active co-operation. There are roads
and railways and reservoirs which only he can make. There are mines
and forests which will slumber for ever without his aid. The mighty
continent of tropical Africa lies open to the colonizing and
organizing capacities of the East. All those new products which modern
industry insistently demands are offered in measureless abundance to
the West--if only we could solve the Sphinx's riddle in its newest
form.
And is it after all beyond our reach to provide, if not a perfect, at
any rate a practical answer? There ought to be no insuperable
difficulty, in the present state of political knowledge and social
organization, in assigning different spheres to the external activity
of different races. The Great Powers have partitioned Africa
territorially; is it beyond the wit of man to divide it economically?
The co-operation of many different kinds of men is needed for the
cultivation of such a noble estate. Is it impossible to regulate in
full and intricate detail the conditions under which that co-operation
shall take place? Here white men can live and thrive; there they
cannot. Here is a task for one, there the opportunity of another. The
world is big enough. [I write as the stream of the Nile bears me
between the immense spaces of beautiful, fertile, unpopulated country
that lie north of the Albert Lake.] There is plenty of room for all.
Why cannot we settle it fairly?
It must be noted that the question of Asiatic immigration presents
itself to the Imperial point of view in several quite distinct forms.
There are, first of all, colonies which stand on the basis of a white
proletariat, and whose inhabitants, rich and poor, employers and
employed, are all Europeans. The right of such colonies to forbid the
entry of large numbers of Asiatics, and to preserve themselves from
the racial chaos and economic disturbance inseparable from such
immigration, cannot be denied, although its exercise ought no doubt to
be governed by various prudential and other considerations. But these
colonies differ markedly from those where the mass of the population
is not white, but black. Again, there are colonies which possess
responsible government, and where the number of the white middle-class
inhabitants very largely exceeds the Asiatic community. It is evident
that these stand in a wholly different position from that of places
like the tropical Protectorates of East and West Africa.
Indeed, it may be contended that the very fact that the native of
British India will undoubtedly, wisely or unwisely, rightly or
wrongly, be refused access in any large numbers to several South
African and all Australian Colonies by their respective Governments,
makes it all the more desirable that the Imperial Government should
afford in the tropical Protectorates outlet and scope to the
enterprise and colonizing capacity of Hindustan. And, as I have
written, these countries are big enough for all. There is no reason
why those Highland areas which promise the white man a home and a
career, and where alone he can live in comfort, should not, as a
matter of practical administration, be in the main reserved for him.
Nor, on the other hand, why the Asiatic, if only he does not teach the
African natives evil ways--a contingency which must not be
forgotten--should not be encouraged to trade and settle as he will in
the enormous regions of tropical fertility to which he is naturally
adapted. Somewhere in this direction--I do not wish to dogmatize--the
immediate course of sound policy would seem to lie, and, guided by the
lights of science and tolerance, we may easily find it.
But the course of these reflections has carried me a good deal farther
than the politics of Nairobi would seem to justify; and I hasten to
return to the question with which I started: "Can the Highlands of
East Africa be made 'a white man's country'?" Let us examine this by a
fresh process. As one rides or marches through the valleys and across
the wide plateaux of these uplands, braced by their delicious air,
listening to the music of their streams, and feasting the eye upon
their natural wealth and beauty, a sense of bewilderment overcomes the
mind. How is it they have never become the home of some superior race,
prosperous, healthy, and free? Why is it that, now a railway has
opened the door and so much has been published about them, there has
not been one furious river of immigration from the cramped and
insanitary jungle-slums of Europe? Why, most of all, are those who
have come--the pioneers, the men of energy and adventure, of large
ambitions and strong hands--why are they in so many cases only just
keeping their heads above water? Why should complaint and discontent
and positive discouragement be so general among this limited class?
I have always experienced a feeling of devout thankfulness never to
have possessed a square yard of that perverse commodity called "land."
But I will confess that, travelling in the East African Highlands for
the first time in my life, I have learned what the sensation of
land-hunger is like. We may repress, but we cannot escape, the desire
to peg out one of these fair and wide estates, with all the rewards
they offer to industry and inventiveness in the open air. Yet all
around are men possessing thousands of fertile acres, with mountains
and rivers and shady trees, acquired for little or nothing, all
struggling, all fretful, nervous, high-strung, many disappointed, some
despairing, some smashed.
What are the true lineaments concealed behind the veil of boundless
promise in which this land is shrouded? Are they not stamped with
mockery? Is not the eye that regards you fierce as well as bright?
"When I first saw this country," said a colonist to me, "I fell in
love with it. I had seen all the best of Australia. I had prospered in
New Zealand. I knew South Africa. I thought at last I had struck
'God's own country.' I wrote letters to all my friends urging them to
come. I wrote a series of articles in the newspapers praising the
splendours of its scenery and the excellence of its climate. Before
the last of the articles appeared my capital was nearly expended, my
fences had been trampled down by troops of zebra, my imported stock
had perished, my title-deeds were still blocked in the Land Office,
and I myself had nearly died of a malignant fever. Since then I have
left others to extol the glories of East Africa."
These second thoughts err, no doubt, as much on the side of
extravagant depression as the first impression was over-sanguine. But
that there is a rude reverse to the East African medal is a fact which
cannot be disputed, and which ought not, in the interests either of
the immigrant or of the country to be concealed. It is still quite
unproved that a European can make even the Highlands of East Africa
his permanent home--that is to say, that he can live there without
sensible degeneration for fifteen or twenty years at a stretch without
ever returning to the temperate zones; still less that he can breed
and rear families through several generations. The exhilaration of the
air must not lead people to forget that an altitude of from five to
eight thousand feet above the sea-level is an unusual condition,
producing results, not yet ascertained, upon the nervous system, the
brain, and the heart. Its coolness can never remove the fact that we
are upon the Equator. Although the skies look so familiar and kindly
with their white fleecy clouds and passing showers, the direct ray of
the sun--almost vertical at all seasons of the year--strikes down on
man and beast alike, and woe to the white man whom he finds
uncovered! Although sheep and oxen multiply so rapidly, although
crossing them with imported stock produces in each generation
astonishing improvements in quality, they are subject to many perils
little understood and often fatal. And if the landscape recalls to the
pensive traveller the peaceful beauties of gentler climes at home, let
him remember that it nurses with blithe fecundity poisonous reptiles,
and pest-spreading insects, and terrible beasts of prey.
There is no reason, however, for doubting that modern science
possesses, or will discover, the means of eradicating or mitigating
many of these evils. As the development of the country and the
scientific investigation of tropical agriculture and tropical disease
proceed, the difficulties which beset the early settler will gradually
be removed. He will learn how to clothe and house himself; what to
plant, what to breed, and what to avoid. The spread of East Coast
fever, now carried by the ticks from one animal to another, and
carried by the infected animals from one district to another, will be
arrested, and controlled by a proper system of wire-fencing and
quarantine. Remedies will be discovered against the various diseases
which attack sheep or horses. Zebra, rhinoceros, buffalo, and other
picturesque and fascinating nuisances will be driven from or
exterminated within the settled areas, and confined to the ample
reserves of uninhabited land. The slow but steady growth of a white
population will create a market for local agricultural produce. The
powerfully equipped Scientific Departments, the Veterinary and
Forestry Departments, and the Department of Agriculture newly
established on a considerable scale, will be able to guide and assist
the enterprise of the new-comer, and save him from repeating the
ill-starred experiments of the pioneer. Roads will improve, and
railways and mono-rail tramways will extend. Step by step life and the
means of living will become easier and more secure. Still it will not
be proved that the pure-bred European can rear his children under the
Equatorial sun and at an elevation of more than six thousand feet; and
till that is proved "the white man's country" will remain a white
man's dream.
I have written of Europeans and Asiatics. What of the African? About
four millions of these dark folk are comprised within the districts
of the East Africa Protectorate which are actually or partially
administered. Many more lie beyond those wide and advancing
boundaries. What is to be their part in shaping the future of their
country? It is, after all, _their_ Africa. What are they going to do
for it, and what is it going to do for them? "The natives," says the
planter, "evince a great reluctance to work, especially to work
regularly." "They must be made to work," say others. "Made to work for
whom?" we innocently ask. "For us, of course," is the ready answer;
"what did you think we meant?" And here we run into another herd of
rhinoceros questions--awkward, thick-skinned, and horned, with a short
sight, an evil temper, and a tendency to rush blindly up wind upon any
alarm. Is the native idle? Does he not keep himself and pay his taxes?
Or does he loll at his ease while his three or four wives till the
soil, bear the burden, and earn his living? And if idle, has he a
right to remain idle--a naked and unconscious philosopher, living "the
simple life," without cares or wants,--a gentleman of leisure in a
panting world? Is that to be the last word? Is civilization to say
definitely that when the African native has kept himself, or made his
women keep him, she has no further claim upon him? The white man shall
do the rest. He shall preserve the peace, that the tribes may prosper
and multiply. His watchful and foreseeing eye, strained and weary with
the effort, shall still make provision against famine; his science,
though he himself goes down in the struggle, shall grapple with
pestilence and cure disease. Far from his home or from his family he
shall hew the trees and dig the wells, shall dam the streams and build
the roads, with anxious heart and "in the sweat of his brow,"
according to the curse laid upon the child of many wants, while the
child of few wants watches him from the shade and thinks him mad.
And to compare the life and lot of the African aboriginal--secure in
his abyss of contented degradation, rich in that he lacks everything
and wants nothing--with the long nightmare of worry and privation, of
dirt and gloom and squalour, lit only by gleams of torturing knowledge
and tantalizing hope, which constitutes the lives of so many poor
people in England and Scotland, is to feel the ground tremble under
foot. "It would never do to have a lot of 'mean whites' in this
country," I heard one day a gentleman say. "It would destroy the
respect of the native for the white man, if he saw what miserable
people we have got at home." So here, at any rate, the boot is on the
other leg, and Civilization is ashamed of her arrangements in the
presence of a savage, embarrassed lest he should see what lies behind
the gold and purple robe of State, and begin to suspect that the
all-powerful white man is a fraud. But this is an irrelevancy!
I am clearly of opinion that no man has a right to be idle, whoever he
be or wherever he lives. He is bound to go forward and take an honest
share in the general work of the world. And I do not except the
African native. To a very much larger extent than is often recognized
by some who discuss these questions, the natives are industrious,
willing to learn, and capable of being led forward. Live for a few
weeks, as I have done, in close association with the disciplined
soldiers of the King's African Rifles, or with the smart sailors of
the Uganda Marine, and it seems wonderful to contrast them with the
population from which they have emerged. How strong, how good-natured,
how clever they are! How proud their white officers are of them! What
pains they take to please the travellers whom they escort; how frankly
they are delighted by a word of praise or thanks! Just and honourable
discipline, careful education, sympathetic comprehension, are all that
is needed to bring a very large proportion of the native tribes of
East Africa to a far higher social level than that at which they now
stand. And why should men only be taught to be soldiers? Is war always
to have the best of everything? Cannot peaceful industry be made as
attractive, be as highly organized, as carefully studied as the
combined use of deadly weapons? "Why," as Ruskin asks, "cannot men
take pride in _building_ villages instead of only _carrying_ them?"
I wonder why my pen slips off into these labyrinths, when all I set
out to do was to give some general idea of politics at Nairobi? But in
truth the problems of East Africa are the problems of the world. We
see the social, racial, and economic stresses which rack modern
society already at work here, but in miniature; and if we choose to
study the model when the whole engine is at hand, it is because on the
smaller scale we can see more clearly, and because in East Africa and
Uganda the future is still uncompromised. The British Government has
it in its hands to shape the development and destiny of these new
countries and their varied peoples with an authority and from an
elevation far superior to that with which Cabinets can cope with the
giant tangles at home. And the fact stirs the mind. But by this time
the reader will have had as much of East African politics as I had
when, after three days of deputations and disputations, the train
steamed out of Nairobi to take us to the Great Lake and beyond.