We Can Go
Into Her Colonies And Do Business With French Goods, And This Is
Done; But French Goods Are
Not so suitable, from their make, nor
capable of being sold at a sufficient profit to make a big trade.
But France throws few obstacles, if any, in the matter of plantation
enterprise. Still this enterprise being so hampered by the dearth
of good labour is not at the present time highly remunerative in
Africa.
FOREIGN LABOUR. - Several important authorities have advocated the
importation of foreign labour into Africa. This seems to me to be a
fatal error, for several reasons. For one thing, experience has by
now fully demonstrated that the West Coast climate is bad for men
not native to it, whether those men be white, black, or yellow. The
United Presbyterian Mission who work in Old Calabar was founded with
the intention of inaugurating a mission which, after the white men
had established it, was to be carried on by educated Christian
blacks from Jamaica, where this mission had long been established
and flourished. But it was found that these men, although primarily
Africans, had by their deportation from Africa in the course, in
some cases, of only one generation, lost the power of resistance to
the deadly malarial climate their forefathers possessed, and so the
mission is now carried on by whites; not that these good people have
a greater resistance to the fever than the Jamaica Christians, but
because they are more devoted to the evangelisation of the African;
and what black assistance they receive comes, with the exception of
Mrs. Fuller, from a few educated Effiks of Calabar.
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