Page:West African Studies.djvu/412

 make his farm on bits of forest that require very hard clearing work. He clears as easily as he can by means of collecting the great fluffy seed bunches of a certain tree which are inflammable and adding to them all the other inflammable material he can get; he then places these bonfires in the bit of forest he wants to clear and sets fire to them on a favourable night, when the proper sort of breeze is blowing to fan the flames; when the conflagration is over, he fells a few of the trees and leaves the rest standing scorched but not killed. Moreover, of course an African gentleman cannot go and make his farm anywhere he likes: he has to stick to the land which belongs to his family, and work round and round on that. This gives a highly untidy aspect to the family estate, you might think; considering the extent of it, a very small percentage must be kept under cultivation and the rest neglected. But this is not really so; if you were to go and take away from him a bit of the neglected land, you would be taking his farm, say for the year after next and grievously inconvenience him, and he would know it.

The native method of making farms does not, indeed, do so much harm in well-watered, densely-populated regions like those of Sierra Leone or the Niger Delta; but it does do an immense amount of harm in regions that are densely populated and require to make extensive farms, more particularly in the regions of Lagos and the Gold Coast, where the fertile belt is only a narrow ribbon, edged on the one side by the sand sea of the Sahara, and on the other by the salt sea of the South Atlantic. You can see the result of it in the district round Accra, which has always been heavily populated; for hundreds of years the forest has been kept down by agricultural enterprise. Consequences are, the rainfall is now diminished to a point that threatens to extinguish