The Hailey Survey

Abstract

Opening ParagraphL'ÉTUDE DES LANGUES AFRICAINES: RÉSULTATS ACTUELS ET CEUX QUE L'ON ESPÈRE DANS L'AVENIRIt is only the span of one man's lifetime since the veil which had shrouded the heart of Africa from the knowledge of the outer world was torn aside by the great explorers. Between 1858 and 1872 the dominant physical features of Central Africa were discovered. Little more than ten years later, all this vast new-found area had been ‘partitioned’, together with the previously known and partly occupied country on the seaboard, between the colonial Powers of Europe. Since that time a variety of governments have been grappling according to their lights with the wide range of problems, physical and social, political and economic, involved in the administration of African peoples. They have had little to guide them. In South Africa, it is true, a great body of Africans, racially akin to those of Tropical Africa, had long been under European government; but the fact that the climate of South Africa had permitted Europeans to make it the homeland of a new European nation meant that the lessons of South African experience were largely inapplicable to that greater part of Tropical Africa which is unsuited for European settlement.