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 the tropical western part of the Continent, the most populous as it is intrinsically the richest. When the slave-trade received its death blow, an export trade in natural produce, which had preceded the slave-trade in many parts of the west coast and had never been wholly extirpated, revived and extended inland. Thanks to the improved transport facilities of the last thirty years it has attained very large dimensions, much larger than most people suspect. In the territories drained by the Congo and its affluents, the Congo Free State and the French Congo, Leopoldianism, sweeping like a pestilence over the land, has flung back this natural growth for generations, perhaps for centuries; perhaps the damage done is irreparable. But north of the Congo, in the Britieh, French, and German dependencies, European administration has in the main proceeded on rational lines, with corresponding economic results. Although, with the notable exception of Northern Nigeria, little or no legislation directed specifically to safeguarding native rights in land has yet been evolved, the native population has, generally speaking, been left in undisturbed possession of the soil, and has been encouraged to develop its fruits for export purposes in freedom, on its own indigenous land-holding and labour system, and on its own account. The Germans in the Kamerun did, it is true, import East African practices by introducing the plantation system for the cultivation of cocoa, and pursued it for some years with commendable enterprise and scientific care The economic results, however, were anything but brilliant, and the remarkabte achievements of the Fanti and Ashanti farmer in the Gold Coast with the same crop—which I shall refer to later on—had made a profound impression upon German experts who had studied both systems de visu. In their other West African dependency of Togoland the Germans, imitating the policy of the British Administration in Nigeria and the methods of the British Cotton Growing Association in that dependency and in Uganda, had succeeded in getting cotton growing for export started as a native industry by native farmers in their own right.

Western Africa offers a remarkable, indeed, a unique, field for profitable study in the capacity of aboriginal peoples to develop the natural or cultivable riches of their land as free men and landowners, to the advantage of