Page:Morel-The Black Mans Burden.djvu/194

 yoke. It was a despotic but not ordinarily a heavy yoke; for once installed as a conqueror it was his obvious policy that the land he had conquered should be prosperous and peaceable. He became an institution in the country, assembled round him large retinues of slaves and concubines. His rule was patriarchal, but it was permanent. The people remained a beaten people. They became servants. He remained the master and concentrated in his own hands the external trade and the industry of the country. The stigma of serfdom was never lifted from the people he had subjugated in arms. Their power of initiative was undermined.

Portuguese rule, which alternated with Arab rule for three centuries in Eastern Africa, was in many respects similar to the latter in its effects upon the native population, except that it was more destructive. The first period of its activity was marked by all the characteristics which distinguished contemporary Spanish and Portuguese policy in South America—the enslavement of the population and the pillage of the country on behalf of the national treasury. The second period of its activity was cursed by the Slave trade in order to supply the increasing demand of the Brazilian markets. And here, as in Angola, but unlike the rest of Western Africa, the Slave-trading Power was its own purveyor: actually established in and occupying the country: breaking the people. When the Slave trade disappeared, the Portuguese grip upon the East Coast relaxed, and the edifice of Portuguese rule became like the pillars of a building invaded by the white ant—without substance. Thus the combined effect of centuries of Arab and Portuguese domination in the major portion of the eastern part of the African Continent, went to crush the spirit of independence and initiative in the native peoples and to make of them slaves and domestics rather than traders and producers in their own right.

This difference in the history of their contact with the outer world is, in the main, explanatory of the divergence in the economic status of the peoples of East and West Africa to-day. Native export industries may hardly be said to exist in the eastern part of the Continent except in Uganda, and the sytem of European plantations worked by hired, or forced, native labour is the rule. An inherited tendency has inclined the various European