can alienate his land for ever. But private property in land conveys no such right, and implies no such power under the African system. Security and perpetuity of tenure the individual possesses: he benefits from his improvements, subject always to the performance of his civic duties. But the land is not his to dispose of, and at his death it reverts to the community. The structural law of tenure for the individual is thus the right of user, not of owner in our sense of the term. Land not in actual cultivation by individuals is the common property of the community. When it is allotted, the individual allottee becomes the owner of it, in the African sense, i.e., no other individual can interfere with him, trespass upon his ground and expel him from it, or lay hands upon the crops that he has reared upon it.
Under this system no member of an African community is ever in want. If a member of an African family—using the word in its African signification—emigrates for a time, his heritage in the land is waiting for him when he returns. No man starves or can starve. There are no paupers in Africa, except where the white man has created them, either deliberately and for his own purposes, by expropriating the people from their ancestral lands; or, stopping short of that, has allowed European legal ideas and practices with their conception of freehold and mortgage to bring a pauper class into existence. In the latter respect the African system is not free from danger at the hands not only of Europeans, but of a certain class of natives educated in Western notions of law, and of scheming non-educated members within the indigenous community itself. The growth of an aboriginal landlord class is an insidious peril to be guarded against by a vigilant administration. Its extension means social disaster for the majority, and our Indian experiences have taught us how difficult it is to undo that sort of mischief once it has taken firm hold. There are other reasons beyond those already indicated why a European Administration which is inspired by a statesmanlike grasp of the African problem should seek to preserve rather than to shake the foundations of African tenure in land. One of those reasons is the indissoluble connection between the system of African tenure, and the problem of the government of African communities by white men.
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