CHAPTER XXIV

ANGLO-FRENCH RELATIONS IN WEST AFRICA

The subject of the relationship between England and France in West Africa is one to which every year that passes adds importance. The French have during the last few years left us far behind in Western Africa, so far as territorial expansion is concerned. They have now a great Empire there. They have acquired it by dint of persistent, far-sighted, courageous effort; qualities which it is regrettable to state have been conspicuously lacking on the part of the British official world. If a tithe of the energy which has distinguished Liverpool, Manchester, Glasgow, and Bristol merchants in Western Africa had been displayed by successive British Governments, the possessions of Great Britain in West Africa to-day would be infinitely more extensive than they are.

In addition to getting the better of us, in a territorial sense, France—whose possessions touch our own at almost every point—is steadily becoming a serious commercial competitor. It is with that commercial competition that we shall have to reckon in the future to an increasing degree. It is of two kinds. There is legitimate competition and unfair competition. In either case it behoves us to carefully study its nature and consequences; to draw the necessary lessons therefrom; to candidly acknowledge in a spirit of tolerant common sense that in many respects the cause of its pressing hardly upon us is due to superior management on the part of the French; to appeal to the spirit of equity and fair play in our neighbours, when, as is the case in some parts of their West African possessions at present, British merchants, who have powerfully contributed in creating the trade of those very possessions, are getting neither fair play nor just treatment; and generally to brace ourselves together, realising that in West Africa, as everywhere else, the old position of undisputed commercial supremacy which Great Britain was able to maintain at one time with very little trouble, can no longer be retained unless we shake off our facile opportunism and tackle the new conditions in a scientific manner.

Of early French enterprise in Western Africa very little seems to be known by the average Englishman; and yet the French were among the very first pioneers of Western Africa—probably the very first—before the Portuguese, at any rate, by at least 100 years. After the remarkable studies recently published in the French African Committee’s journal by Commandant Binger, the distinguished chief of the African department of the French Colonial Office, there is not, I think, any alternative but to accept as conclusive the French claim of being the first Europeans to visit the West African coast. Spanish and Genoese navigators; the former hailing from Catalonia, the Lancashire of Spain, may possibly have been contemporaneous with the French. But, apart from French testimony, it is affirmed by eminent Spanish authorities themselves, such as Navarette and Viera, that the French preceded their own countrymen. The Canaries were discovered by a Genoese of French descent, and with a French name, Maloisel to wit, about 1275 A.D. They were also conquered by a Frenchman named De Béthancourt in the first years of the fifteenth century. In the beginning of the fourteenth the West African coast as far south as the Senegal certainly, and Sierra Leone probably, was regularly visited by French ships. So much has now been established. Whether French ships then pushed south to the Gold Coast is not quite so clear. Personally I incline to the belief that this has also been satisfactorily made out, and the confirmatory testimony of Villaut-de-Bellefonds no longer stands alone.

The paucity of historical and documentary evidence has hitherto been the principal objection to the French claim of priority. It has, of course, been made the most of by Portuguese historians. But, apart from the circumstance that Commandant Binger has now been able to partly fill up the gap, and apart from the eminently reasonable explanation of Labat that the old records of the port of Dieppe, from whence many of the French ships bound to the West Coast started, were destroyed by the bombardment of that port in 1694, there is very good reason, to my mind, why the Portuguese on the one hand should possess such splendid and unique accounts of their early exploits in West Africa from the middle of the fifteenth century onwards; and why, on the other hand, the French, who arrived on the scene at least a century before them, should be so poorly represented in their own national archives. The reason is this. The enterprise of Portugal in West Africa—which has so incomparably enriched the domain of geographical knowledge—was, from the first, an official undertaking. It was conceived by Prince Henry the Navigator, one of the most remarkable figures in history, and all the resources of the science and literature of the age were invoked by him to give to the new epoch of discovery a national and historical permanency, which should be the means of reflecting glory for ever on Portuguese annals. Very different was the enterprise of the French. It was in no sense official, but private. It was undertaken not by renowned knights and important personages in kingly service, but by hardy, illiterate, independent mariners and merchants of Normandy. The object was not, as in the case of the Portuguese, fame, geographical discovery, and religious zeal, but trade. The men who fitted out the French ships and sent them on their perilous course were Dieppe, Rouen, and Honfleur merchants; and the French vessels returned, not with captives forcibly torn from their homes with every accompaniment of cruelty in order to convert them to a faith of peace, charity, and good-will, but with ivory, spices, and gold dust. That was the earliest form of trade in West Africa by the people of Western Europe. The slave trade came afterwards. To this day a local industry in ivory carving exists at Dieppe, and every one who has visited that quaint old seaport has noticed the numerous ivory ornaments displayed in the shop windows. If, therefore, the British merchants can claim to be the latter-day pioneers of commercial enterprise in West Africa; if during the century that has just closed their commercial aptitude and initiative gained for them the foremost commercial position on the West African littoral, it was French merchants who originally led the way. We have too often led the way ourselves in most parts of the world to begrudge the French this honour, so far as Western Africa is concerned. Rather should it be a bond of respect, the twin sister of sympathy between us and our neighbours.

The first recorded instance upon which Englishmen and Frenchmen met off the West African coast resulted, curiously enough, in an alliance. It happened in this way. One William Towerson, in the course of a voyage to Guinea in 1555, being pursued by some Portuguese brigantines, opportunely came across a fleet of French ships, with whom he joined company for safety. The alliance does not seem to have been a very satisfactory one, as it turned out; still, it was an alliance, of sorts. This first meeting took place some thirty-five years subsequent to the earliest known appearance of an Englishman in West Africa, in the person of one Andrew Battel, of Leigh—whether an ancestor of the three old maids of that ilk, history sayeth not—who put to sea in a Portuguese slaver, and after many extraordinary adventures amongst the natives of Angola, succeeded in getting back to his native country. The beginning of the sixteenth century marked the awakening of Englishmen to the potentialities of the West African trade. It had been preceded by a notable slackening in the energies of Normandy merchants. The Hundred Years’ War with England had crippled enterprise of any kind in France. The House of Valois was in a parlous state. The great war which began in 1337 and continued, with occasional breaks of short duration, until the marvellous successes of the Maid of Orleans compelled the English to give way, was marked by the crushing defeats the French sustained at Crecy and Poitiers at the hands of Edward III., and at Agincourt at the hands of Henry V.; and, to make use of some quoted words, “The State was reduced to bankruptcy, the nobility excited to rebellion, and the mass of the people sunk in barbarism.”

No sooner, however, had the victories of Joan of Arc infused new vitality into the French, than we find renewed evidence of the enterprise of Dieppe and Rouen merchants in West Africa. The revival of that enterprise coincides with the entry upon the scene of English merchants: Windham, Hawkins of evil memory, Rutter, Baker, and others, and the records bear witness to the contemporary presence of French trading vessels on the West Coast from Senegal to the Gold Coast. Recent discoveries of old manuscripts, dating back to 1574, at Honfleur prove that from that year to 1583—a space of nine years—thirty-two French vessels left that port alone for West Africa. For some time English and French got on well enough on the West Coast. The power of Portugal was fast decaying, and adventurers of all nationalities, notably the Dutch, were hurrying to the spot. Then came more wars between English and French, with their natural effect upon commercial transactions in West Africa. In 1696 the French destroyed the British settlement at the mouth of the Gambia. For the next hundred years or so relations between the Europeans established or trading on the West Coast appear as a tangle of animosities. Every one seemed to be fighting his neighbour, and pirates of all nationalities attacked every vessel they came across, including those owned or manned by men of their own race, even Gambia Castle, garrisoned by a British force, being on one occasion captured and sacked by a notorious British pirate named Davies, presumably a Welshman! Notwithstanding all this dire confusion, the English were gradually getting the upper hand all down the coast. In 1794 Sierra Leone was bombarded by a French squadron without the authority apparently of the Revolutionary Government then in power. Twenty years later, the power of Napoleon having collapsed, all that was left to France by the Treaty of Vienna was her settlement on the coast of Senegal.

England remained in a preponderating position politically and commercially on the West African coast. Such, too, was her position in the main until the revival of a French Colonial policy, under the impulse of those far-seeing statesmen Gambetta and Jules Ferry in 1883. At any period between 1815 and 1883 England had the opportunity of creating an extensive Empire in West Africa and annexing practically the whole coast.

And here the curtain rings down on the old _régime_, and a new chapter in the history of Anglo-French relationship in West Africa begins.

To whom should be properly attributed the initiation of the scramble for Africa? It has been a cause of considerable inconvenience to the Cabinets of Europe, and of still greater inconvenience, we may feel tolerably certain, to the natives of Africa. Each Power that participated in it throws the onus on its neighbour. So far as West Africa is concerned, whatever claim or credit may be taken, the French must, I think, be held guilty or meritorious, according as individual opinion may differ. The scramble in West Africa arose from what, for want of a better description, may be termed the discovery by the French of the West African hinterlands. When Gambetta and Jules Ferry awoke the slumbering colonial instincts of their countrymen, inland West Africa was to all intents and purposes a blank. Englishmen and Frenchmen sat on the coast, the former doing a large trade and the latter little or none. In two places only were organised attempts at interior penetration being made. On the Lower Niger, Englishmen were pushing their trade inland. On the Senegal, the era of political conquest begun by Faidherbe was being slowly developed, despite many difficulties and set-backs. The political energies of Great Britain were paralysed by the resolution arrived at in 1865 to abandon all Government action in West Africa, with the possible exception of Sierra Leone. France was still feeling the effects of the disasters of 1870.

With the propaganda of Jules Ferry and Gambetta in favour of a policy of Colonial expansion, a change came o’er the spirit of the dream as regards West Africa. Backed by a strong body of opinion; supported by men of note, such as M. Waldeck Rousseau, as he has himself recently reminded us, French activity in Western Africa became very pronounced, and the work once begun was not abandoned on account of the temporary reverses suffered by French arms in Tonquin, which drove Ferry from power and broke his heart. French missions, generally of a peaceful character, started eastwards and southwards from the Senegal, and northwards from the coast, to explore the unknown interior. They reported it to be a fairly salubrious, fertile, cereal-producing and cattle-rearing country, unobstructed by dense forests such as are met with inland from the West Coast proper to a depth varying from sixty to two hundred miles. This country was inhabited by intelligent races relatively advanced in the scale of civilisation, possessing flourishing industries and commercial aptitude. The French found regularly constituted States, more or less Muslimised, and in some of which social law and order had reached a high stage of development; large towns of 10,000 to 15,000 inhabitants with regular market-days, where iron smelting was highly advanced, where the natives dressed in handsome clothes of their own manufacture, and used leather sandals, sword-belts, and scabbards, despatch-bags, and saddles fabricated by themselves. It was a revelation. The chief drawback about this vast inland region, which seemed to offer such brilliant prospects under able administrative supervision, was its liability to be swept by fire and sword at any moment by some over-zealous adherent of a certain militant sect of Mohammedans, which enjoyed great influence in the Western Sudan. These French agents were generally well received, and by their means vast stretches of hitherto unknown country were opened up and brought to the knowledge of the world.

Out of these discoveries was born the desire—the very natural and legitimate desire—on the part of the French to build up a mighty empire in West Africa, a black Indies, which should rival the Indies of the East in extent, in wealth, and in the prestige which its acquisition would confer. Exploring and semi-political missions were followed by expeditions of a definite political character, and district after district, State after State, tribe after tribe, came under French influence; by peaceful means in the majority of cases. All this time the English were doing nothing, in an official sense. Liverpool men were calling upon the Government to wake up to what was going on, but their efforts were entirely unsuccessful. Wider and wider grew the sweep of the French net, closer and closer to our own Colonies, which it threatened to throttle in its meshes. Sierra Leone became encircled on three sides by French territory; the magnificent country of Futa-Jallon, the Switzerland of Western Africa as it has been called, which had been visited at various times by agents of the Government of Sierra Leone (notably Dr. Blyden), of which it formed the natural hinterland, was acquired by France without firing a shot. The Gold Coast, and Lagos, and what is now known as Northern Nigeria—whose safety the Convention of 1890 was supposed to guarantee—were in imminent danger of sharing a similar fate.

I have often seen it stated, even by authorities of no mean order, that the French were permitted or allowed to carry out the great task of securing the hinterlands of Western Africa. In point of fact, the statement is very misleading and has had a somewhat mischievous effect. England was not in a position to allow or disallow. The French conceived a plan and carried it out in the face of tremendous obstacles; they were prepared to undergo sacrifices which we were not prepared to accept, and such being the case, they were answerable to none but themselves. Their success and our failure was the due measure of their enterprise and our apathy.

When the future of our Colonies appeared thoroughly compromised by the cutting off of the interior markets, the British Government suddenly realised that Liverpool and Manchester merchants had been clearer-sighted than British officialdom, and at the last moment efforts were made to secure for the British Colonies such of the hinterlands which remained unabsorbed. Then arose a very delicate position, which taxed the diplomatic resources of both Powers to the uttermost. British and French officers with excitable native troops under their command, remained facing one another in the far interior a few hundred yards distance for weeks at a time, awaiting instructions from the irrespective Governments. To the good sense, tact, and mutual esteem of these officers is due that peace was preserved between England and France. We owe a deep debt of gratitude to these men, who, suffering from the debilitating effects of the West African climate and the hardships attendant upon West African travel—neither of which are conducive to sweetness of temper, managed to keep their heads. Mainly thanks to them the quarrel was adjusted without bloodshed, and the Anglo-French Convention of 1898 was signed. It left our Colonies of the Gold Coast and Lagos greatly circumscribed, but assured us in “Nigeria” a magnificent territory some 504,000 square miles in extent.

The era of territorial rivalry between Great Britain and France in Western Africa has, it may be legitimately assumed, quite passed away. We continue to be rivals in commercial matters, but that is a peaceful rivalry—or should be—which ought not to exclude friendship. Nevertheless, as trade questions are often converted into fertile causes of dispute, it is essential that Englishmen and Frenchmen, in order to work harmoniously together in the future, should thoroughly understand one another’s points of view in this connection. We, as a nation, are free traders. The French, as a nation, are protectionists. It would be absurd and undignified for us to complain of the different economic standpoint taken up by our neighbours. Moreover, there are various degrees of protectionism in France. There is the extreme school of M. Méline, which, if its doctrines were strictly applied to the French West African Colonies, would ruin them in five years. There is the school which upholds partial protectionism in France, but favours freedom of trade in the French Colonies. The latter is happily gaining in strength. We should endeavour as far as in us lies to work with the representatives of this school. One of the clauses of the 1898 Convention, which caused a great outcry in France when it became known, stipulated that no differential treatment was to be meted out to British trade throughout a considerable part of the French West African possessions for a term of thirty years. The following extract, bearing on this subject, from an address read by M. Bohn, the head of the largest firm of French West African merchants, before the Marseilles Geographical Society, in September 1898, three months after the Convention was signed, is interesting:

“A certain colonial school,” said M. Bohn, “starting from the premise that the only object of colonies is to favour the outlet of goods manufactured in the mother country, demands the application of prohibitive tariffs upon foreign goods imported into our colonies. This system, which contributed so powerfully to lose Spain her finest colonies, flourishes in Gaboon, which is the least prosperous of our colonies, and which only subsists at all by constant grants in aid from the metropolis. These examples are hardly encouraging. On the other hand, we are able to see that those of our colonies which are developing themselves in the most rapid and satisfactory manner are those where no differential tariffs exist.... From that point of view it is certain the Franco-English Convention of June 1898, by abolishing for a period of thirty years all differential duties in the Ivory Coast and Dahomey, has assured for that period the commercial prosperity of these colonies.”

That notable statement and others like it (the truth of which has been amply borne out since) show that experienced Frenchmen engaged in the West African trade realise, as we do, that a policy of free trade is one which in West Africa spells commercial success by the nation which adopts it. The existence of such views in France is a very encouraging sign for those who firmly believe that trade is the greatest progressive agency which can be brought to bear upon the relations between Western Europe and Western Africa.

Recent events are proving that a natural community of interests exists between British and French merchants in Western Africa; that they will have to fight a common foe, the Concessionnaire, and that every action calculated to bring them into closer relationship is a step in the right direction.