The African as a Producer

Abstract

A FRICA is traditionally the Dark Continent; today we are seeking to make it the Developing Continent. The approach to the problems involved is of supreme importance and we can afford to neglect none of the practical results of the past. Imagination and courage inspired the Colonial Development Fund which for ten years earmarks ?I2 million annually to be spent on a longterm programme of development, betterment, and education. Originally planned while the outcome of the war was still in doubt and to be paid for by a hard pressed, heavily taxed people, it is potentially an act of high constructive statesmanship. If successfully carried through in this spirit it will, like Portia's quality of mercy, bless both giver and taker. But its practical application requires to be guided by experience, in which our people are rich. The pace of African progress is no longer that of the ox or the camel; it is that of the African producer. Properly directed and assisted, the fruits of his increasing output will yield not only improved conditions locally but also expanding markets for the products of British industry. The old conception of the white pioneer as necessarily the exploiter of the unsophisticated native is often very wide of the mark, as readers of Albert Schweitzer's On the Edge of the Priitaeval Forest will know. That great and unselfish humanist shows how disastrously white courage and enterprise may be negatived by the fecklessness and unreliability of the African, ignorant, superstitious, and often disease-ridden. Livingstone's journals also bear witness to this. It is against this background that in Africa the Colonial Development programme must be carried to fruitful achievement. African communities have witnessed four stages in recent historical development. Each repays brief examination in the light of the factors on which productive development so largely depends: health, diet, family life, production environment, especially in relation to the land, and production incentive. The first of these stages was that of the primitive community before the incursion of the European. Life therein generally resembled less that of Rousseau's noble savage than of Hobbes's state of nature 'nasty, brutish and short'. For man and beast, it was a case of the survival of the fittest, though in favoured circumstances a people might for a time attain the simple well-being witnessed by Speke and Baker in Uganda. Population was static at a low level, there were few inducements to sustained activity, and consequently natural fertility of land and forest remained unimpaired. In the second stage this primitive equilibrium is shattered by the white 349