THE NATIONAL INDUSTRY OF SOUTHERN NIGERIA
The palm-oil tree is the staple product of the whole of the coastwise
regions of West Africa from Sierra Leone[54] right down to the Lower
Congo. The Niger Delta may be considered as the central region of its
production. Since regular administration was set up in the rivers,[55]
the output of the oil and kernels of the palm-oil tree has been as
follows:
OIL.
Year. Quantity. Value.
1892-93 10,079,039 gallons £482,803
1893-94 12,207,658 ” 637,625
1894-95 Not ascertainable 505,637
1895-96 10,672,106 gallons 514,303
1896-97 9,350,559 ” 465,583
1897-98 8,476,955 ” 410,134
1898-99 8,113,820 ” 397,870
1900[56] Not stated in C. O. report 491,131
The great majority of the oil is sent to England, but France takes a
considerable quantity (£70,880 out of the total of £491,131 in 1900), and
Germany also purchases a fair amount (£28,094 in 1900).
KERNELS.
Year. Quantity. Value.
1892-93 34,710 tons £301,483
1893-94 39,224 ” 334,144
1894-95 Not ascertainable 295,313
1895-96 36,640 tons 296,397
1896-97 38,043 ” 290,125
1897-98 39,529 ” 295,545
1898-99 40,528 ” 305,791
1900[57] Not given in C. O. report 430,016
The output of kernels seems to be steadily on the increase. Germany is
far and away the largest purchaser of Nigeria’s kernels. In 1900 she
took more than two-thirds—to the value of £346,997—of the total for that
year.[58] Thus in eight years the fruit of the palm-oil tree in Nigeria
is seen by these figures to have yielded no less than £6,453,900. The
production has certainly been greater, as the Niger Company’s exports of
oil and kernels are only included for 1900, the quantities and values for
the preceding years not being publicly accessible.
[Illustration: MAKING PALM-OIL]
The chief centres of palm-oil production in the Niger proper as distinct
from the Delta, or, in other words, in the territories formerly under the
administrative sway of, and still almost entirely tapped in a commercial
sense by, the Niger Company are Ogute Lake, Atani, and Onitsha. The Ogute
Lake produces about 4500 casks of oil annually; it is connected by the
Orashe River, for small craft drawing four feet in the dry season and
eight feet in the rainy season, with Degama, but is only open from the
Niger River during the rainy season (for craft drawing seven feet) or say
from August to the end of December. It is about seventy hours distant
from Burutu. Atani yields about 6000 casks per annum. It is open from the
sea _viâ_ Burutu or Akassa all the year round. Distance from Burutu about
two and a half days. Onitsha will probably exceed before long the other
two districts mentioned as a productive centre, the population being very
dense; distance from Burutu, three days. For kernels, Assay is the chief
centre, producing about 6000 tons annually. It is open all the year round
from Burutu for craft drawing about five to five and a half feet, and
between July and October the rains permit of navigation for craft drawing
up to twelve feet; passage from Burutu, twenty-four hours. Illushi, Idah,
Lokoja, Egga, Jebba, and Shongo are other important centres.
The commerce derived from the oil-palm tree, apart from its paramount
importance in a commercial sense, has many and varied features of
interest. It was, for example, so far as the oil is concerned, the
trade which first took the place of the slave traffic. The beverage
extracted from it is mentioned in some of the oldest references to the
Dark Continent—thus we know that Cambyses “delighted” in its flavour,
and Herodotus tells us that amongst the gifts with which he despatched
the mission of the Ichthyophagi to Ethiopia was “a cask of palm-wine.”
Collecting the palm-tree’s fruit may also be said to be the national
industry of the West African Negro almost all along the coast—certainly
in Southern Nigeria.[59] It is an industry which permanently employs
hundreds of thousands of Negroes, men, women, and children, and gives
work to many thousands of white men, from the merchant to the steamship
owner, from the manufacturer to the chemist. Often in watching the long
files of carts conveying the bulky barrels in which palm-oil is shipped
home from the west coast, passing along the Liverpool streets, or the
rows upon rows of these casks and heaps of palm-kernel bags piled up
on the dock’s side, have I marvelled at the ignorance of those persons
who inform us that the native of West Africa will not _work_. Not work,
with this testimony to his labours! Not work, when hundreds of English
workmen are busy unloading, rolling and carting these proofs of the
Negro’s industry every month in the year, every week in the month, every
day in the week almost! Not work, when it is borne in mind that this
brilliant yellow stuff with the penetrating smell, shipped in hundreds of
thousands of gallons from West Africa, is brought down to the coast bit
by bit, in small receptacles, often from considerable distances inland,
on the heads of these idle and lazy people; that the kernels in those
greasy, dirty-looking bags have each been extracted with infinite trouble
from an extremely hard shell, that 400 of them are required to make a
single pound of kernels, and that the market value in Southern Nigeria
of those 400 kernels, to the native, is the maximum sum of one penny! A
stone-breaker’s job in this country is not looked upon as a sinecure, but
I beg leave to doubt whether the stone-breaker would be content with one
penny per every 400 stones he breaks.
[Illustration: DUKE-TOWN, OLD CALABAR, SOUTHERN NIGERIA]
There is not another tree in the whole world which produces money with so
little expense as this particular crop. In Nigeria the oil is prepared
usually in small quantities, in the small villages scattered over the
country. After being prepared, it is in many instances carried by women
and children to some central native market, situate as a rule on the
edge of a waterway. There it is bought by the middlemen so called, who
are really the carriers of the country, and put by them into the casks
previously supplied by the European merchants. The casks are packed
away in canoes, and the middlemen paddle down through the creeks for
distances varying with the length and character of the waterways, to the
merchant’s factory at the mouth. The merchant then pays for the oil,
gives the middleman an empty cask in exchange for the full one, and
ships the latter by the first steamer that comes along, the middlemen
coopering it up and making it as sound as possible before starting off
on their homeward journey. Palm-oil is used in the manufacture of soap
and candles.[60] It is also employed in South Wales and the States in
the preparation of tin plates, the plates when white hot being dipped in
palm-oil, which gives them their smooth and glassy surface. The demand
for palm oil increases annually, and for many years to come is likely to
keep up with the supply.
The transaction which takes place between the merchant and the middleman
native is the simplest feature of the trade. Before that stage has
been reached there are ramifications innumerable. A middleman chief,
for instance, will send ten or twelve canoes up the creeks with goods
which he has purchased on trust[61]—a large proportion of the trade is
still carried out on the trust system, credit being given as between the
merchant and the middleman, the middleman and the producer, and again
the producer with other producers further afield, the nearest producer
becoming thus a middleman or carrier for his more distant countrymen—each
of the canoes being in charge of one of his “boys,” with enough men to
convey the craft to a certain market. There that particular canoe remains
until the goods it has got on board are sold and the canoe is full of
oil. The same thing occurs in the case of every market in the district,
and so on all over the country, the canoes sometimes remaining several
weeks away.
Apart from the porterage, purchase, putting into casks, conveying by
water, final sale and shipment, which employs such numbers of natives in
their respective _rôles_, there is the collection and preparation to be
taken into account before a complete idea can be formed of the varied
stages the palm-oil industry goes through until the product is landed
on our shores. There is, first of all, the process of climbing the tree
to get the fruit, which, of course, is at the top. After removing the
fruit the natives are able, when the nut is properly ripe, to shake it
out of the spiky casing in which it grows. The nut is something like a
plum-stone, only bigger, and contains the oil to the thickness of about
one-eighth of an inch. Inside is the kernel, itself enclosed in a very
hard shell. To extract the oil the outer skin or shell has to be split
or peeled off. The nuts are usually flung into an old canoe, the natives
trampling upon and crushing the outer skin, and then put into boiling
water, which brings the oil to the surface. But there are a good many
ways of preparing the oil, and its different characteristics were at one
time supposed to be due to different ways of preparation on various parts
of the coast. That does not appear to be the opinion now, for the theory
is hardly sufficient to account for the extra quantity of glycerine such
as is met with in Bonny and Old Calabar oil, and the larger proportion of
stearine[62] which exists in the hard kinds of Brass and New Calabar. We
have now come to an end of the history of the collection of palm-oil, and
the second use to which the oil-palm lends itself arrives upon the scene.
[Illustration: FILLING PALM-OIL BARRELS, SOUTHERN NIGERIA]
With the breakage of the nut and the extraction of the oil, there
is left the kernel in its covering. The kernel trade did not become
general[63] until a few years ago, the kernel being usually either left
to decay or to reproduce, and for a considerable time it was pointed
out that hundreds of thousands of pounds were annually lost in this
way. But within a comparatively recent time the natives have been
induced to break the hard shell in which the kernel is enclosed, and the
latter are shipped home in yearly increasing quantities from Nigeria
by the merchants, who dispose of them to the African Oil Mills[64] or
some other seed-crushing establishment in Liverpool, or send them to
Hamburg: Germany, as already stated, being the largest buyer. The kernel
yields an oil which in its concrete form is white in contrast with the
yellowy-red or deep red or ochre colouring of the oil in the nut itself,
and is the principal ingredient in Sunlight and other soaps of a similar
character. In its chemical properties it is almost identical with the oil
pressed from the inside of the cocoa-nut—_i.e._ copra—which is known as
“cocoa-nut oil.” It is exclusively used in the manufacture of soap.
Owing to the very great labour entailed in cracking the shells, a task
generally performed by putting the nut on a stone and breaking it with a
stone or stick, and the immense amount of time wasted by so primitive a
method, it cannot but be a matter for astonishment that some mechanical
contrivance has not been devised and put to general usage whereby the
process might be accelerated and facilitated. It is certainly not due to
any fear of exhausting the supply by too rapid production, for, so far
as any conclusions can be based upon the quantity of oil brought down to
the factories, Nigeria is still a long way off producing anything like
the full quantity of kernels available. The fact is that several attempts
have been made in this direction, but with one exception[65] they have
failed, and the failure has discouraged further efforts. Cracking
machines of various kinds have been imported, but through neglect, the
deadly effect of the West African climate upon machinery of any kind—more
especially perhaps in so very humid a part as the Niger Delta—and other
causes, they have speedily become “old iron.”
[Illustration: A PALM-KERNEL MARKET IN SOUTHERN NIGERIA]
Although it may seem presumptuous for an outsider to make such a
suggestion, I cannot but think that something more might be done, in
a systematic and concentrated way, to bring about so great a reform
as the cracking of the kernel-shells by machinery could not fail to
be; quadrupling as it would the total production, and releasing a
large amount of labour, which could be turned into other channels. In
view of the very meagre remuneration which the native is willing to
accept per pound’s weight of kernels cracked by hand, it is difficult
to understand how any real trouble, that decent wages and tactful
management were capable of overcoming, could be apprehended in the
utilisation of sufficient labour to keep the requisite steam-power at
work, more especially as, it is known, the shells would provide a fairly
efficient fuel ready to hand. Moreover, would machinery elaborate enough
to necessitate steam-power be absolutely essential? Could nothing be
invented in the way of importing automatic hand-cracking machines, the
cracking taking place under white supervision at the factories, and the
middlemen carriers bringing in the undecorticated nut, instead of, as at
present, the kernel itself?[66]
There seems to be much need in this great oil-palm industry, as in other
native industries in West Africa, of co-operation among the official
and commercial classes, which make up the white population—missionaries
excepted—for the adoption of some thorough and comprehensive plan of
teaching the natives more scientific methods of production. It is no use
saying the thing cannot be done. It can be done, and has been done. The
most notable example is provided in the history of ground-nut cultivation
in Senegal, which has by no means reached perfection,[67] or anything
like it, and yet is now realising a million sterling per annum. That
striking result was attained by patient, continuous and unflagging
perseverance on the part of the Bordeaux merchants, coupled with the
friendly support and assistance of the Government, without coercion of
any kind. It took some time, of course, but the results have thoroughly
justified the policy pursued, and Senegal to-day[68] is the foremost
vegetable-oil producing country in the world. We hear a great deal about
technical education in West Africa, carpentering, brick-making, and so
forth, all very admirable in their way, but the time and money spent
in these directions could be more profitably engaged by perfecting the
_existing native industries_ of West Africa, and by creating new ones,
which would do more than anything else to increase the prosperity of
the country, and at the same time be based upon sound science, for
the natural instincts and aptitude of the Negro are pre-eminently
agricultural. Far more lasting good could be achieved thus.
Officials and merchants working side by side for a common aim, and
science—that is what West Africa needs. What a reflection it is upon our
Administration in West Africa, that the commercial position of Sierra
Leone, for instance, should be declining, year by year, largely owing to
a passion for keeping up a form of taxation which is repugnant to the
natives, and does not even pay the cost of collection, when thousands of
pounds annually are wasted in the Sherbro district alone by the natives
merely collecting the kernels, leaving the oil to rot off—all for want
of encouragement, and the teaching of scientific methods of production,
while acres upon acres of rubber-producing land in Lagos have been
impaired by a similar absence of preliminary common sense. Perhaps the
most curious feature of the whole business is that which consists in
turning round and blaming the native for wilful destruction which—in the
latter case mentioned—he was never taught how to avoid. If the oil-palm
industry were taken in hand in practical fashion, there is no possible
doubt that an enormous development would ensue. But while the want of
sympathy and combination, one might almost say the latent opposition,
between the official and merchant class continues, I cannot see that
matters will be different to what they are. The remedy lies very largely
with the Authorities.