The importance of this provision is emphasised further on.
In June, 1912, the Colonial Office, under Lord Harcourt, appointed a Committee, of which the author of this volume was a member, to consider the whole question of land legislation in the other West African dependencies. The Committee sat for two years, took an immense amount of oral evidence, and evidence on commission—both European and African—and had nearly completed its draft report when war broke out. A sub-committee, consisting of Sir Walter Napier, Sir Frederick Hodgson and the present writer, which was then engaged upon revising the draft report, continued its labours and completed the work which in the ordinary course of events would have been completed by the full Committee. The Report recommended that the rules and practices of nature tenure should be upheld,[1] and, where necessary, strengthened by administrative action. It condemned the grant of land concessions, and of monopolistic rights over the produce of the soil to European syndicates and individuals.[2]
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It is essential that we should form a clear idea of the dominating characteristics of the African system of land tenure. The African cannot be governed with comprehension, and, therefore, justly and wisely; his sociology cannot be understood, unless the nature of his customary land laws upon which the corporate nature of African social life is based, are thoroughly grasped. The idea is very prevalent that because the majority of the negro and negroid peoples of Africa are in a condition which we call rather loosely "primitive," there is no such thing as a law of tenure, because it is unwritten, and that African governing institutions do not exist. This is an altogether erroneous view. In point of fact, not only is there a real system of African tenure, but it is an infinitely better, sounder and healthier system than that which the British people tolerate and suffer from in their own country. To most English-
- ↑ Except in certain restricted areas in the neighbourhood of the Coast towns, where European land laws have made inroads upon native custom, and where buying and selling of land has taken root.
- ↑ The Report has been printed but not presented to Parliament. The printed evidence is accessible in the library of the House of Commons.
