the population to find a profitable return by placing extensive areas under ground or pea-nut cultivation. In Sierra Leone ginger is cultivated by the native communities, and the kola tree is exploited as well as the oil-palm. There is a large timber industry in Southern Nigeria and in the Gold Coast mainly in native hands, although European licencees also have a share in this industry, the native communities receiving a portion of the licence fees, which are spent under administrative supervision and in conjunction with the recognised Native Councils upon improving the sanitation of the native towns, constructing water conduits and so on. The prosperity of the tiny Gambia (4,505 square miles) is wholly dependent upon the cultivation of the ground nut, which involves much hard work.
Throughout British West Africa the authorities have given to the principle of trusteeship its only just and wise interpretation. The consistent policy of the Government has been to assist the growth of native industries, to encourage the native communities to work their land for their own profit. With hardly an exception, every administrator from British West Africa examined before the West African Lands Committee, expressed himself in favour of this policy, and the more experience he had of the country the more emphatic was ihis testimony. And, observe the economic results! A year before the war, M. Yves Guyot, the French colonial director of agriculture, made an exhaustive personal inquiry into the British West African dependencies. His impression may be gathered from the following passages in his published report:
There is no more fascinating history than the spread among the dark races—regarded as altogether primitive—of a cultivation hitherto thought to be within the capacity only of white peoples. … Everywhere else, cultivation of this kind has come from the initiative of Europeans; such is the case with coffee in Brazil, with tea in Ceylon, rubber in the Malay archipelago, Ceylon, and Brazil, cocoa on the East Coast of Africa. Here in West Africa it is the black man who has done everything; the introduction and the development of these cultivations are the results of his initiative and of his agricultural ability. Government action came later on. …
Why? Because the West African native has been left in possession of his land and has been regarded and treated as a trader, cultivator and producer in his own right. It
