While a system of native "Reserves" in colonisable South Africa is intelligible, and fairly and justly applied, is perhaps best calculated to ensure the welfare of the native population, its application to the tropical regions of the Continent is thoroughly vicious. Since the white man cannot himself colonise the tropical regions, the only object which such a policy within them can have is that of creating a landless class of natives who can be driven by various measures of direct and indirect coercion into plantation work under white and black overseers—an example of political effort directed to facilitate the direct action of capital in a country where such conceptions constitute a political and economic error of the first magnitude. British East Africa is a black spot in the generally sound record of British administration in the African tropics. The native peoples have been dispossessed of their land on an extensive scale, and administrative activities are concentrated upon furthering what is fundamentally an ephemeral enterprise, the exploitation of the soil of tropical Africa by aliens through native labour. The labour problems which are incessantly occurring in East Africa are the direct and necessary result of a wrong conception of policy. From the situation thus produced, the native suffers probably greater hardships than he suffered under the Arab, because the pressure upon him is perpetual. It is "Empire building" of a kind, no doubt, but its foundations are laid in sand.
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Happily, the "Reserve" system has been kept out of British West Africa. So far, however, only one West African Government has given actual legislative endorsement to the right political conception, viz., the British Administration of Northern Nigeria, whose "Land and Native Rights Proclamation" declares that:
"The whole of the lands of the Protectorate of Northern Nigeria, whether occupied or unoccupied … are hereby declared to be native lands. …"
Among the various reasons given for this wise act of statesmanship in the preamble, is that of the "preservation of existing native customs with regard to the use and occupation of the land."
