CHAPTER IX

THE NATIONAL INDUSTRY OF SOUTHERN NIGERIA

The palm-oil tree is the staple product of the whole of the coastwise regions of West Africa from Sierra Leone[54] right down to the Lower Congo. The Niger Delta may be considered as the central region of its production. Since regular administration was set up in the rivers,[55] the output of the oil and kernels of the palm-oil tree has been as follows:

OIL.

Year. Quantity. Value.

1892-93 10,079,039 gallons £482,803 1893-94 12,207,658 ” 637,625 1894-95 Not ascertainable 505,637 1895-96 10,672,106 gallons 514,303 1896-97 9,350,559 ” 465,583 1897-98 8,476,955 ” 410,134 1898-99 8,113,820 ” 397,870 1900[56] Not stated in C. O. report 491,131

The great majority of the oil is sent to England, but France takes a considerable quantity (£70,880 out of the total of £491,131 in 1900), and Germany also purchases a fair amount (£28,094 in 1900).

KERNELS.

Year. Quantity. Value.

1892-93 34,710 tons £301,483 1893-94 39,224 ” 334,144 1894-95 Not ascertainable 295,313 1895-96 36,640 tons 296,397 1896-97 38,043 ” 290,125 1897-98 39,529 ” 295,545 1898-99 40,528 ” 305,791 1900[57] Not given in C. O. report 430,016

The output of kernels seems to be steadily on the increase. Germany is far and away the largest purchaser of Nigeria’s kernels. In 1900 she took more than two-thirds—to the value of £346,997—of the total for that year.[58] Thus in eight years the fruit of the palm-oil tree in Nigeria is seen by these figures to have yielded no less than £6,453,900. The production has certainly been greater, as the Niger Company’s exports of oil and kernels are only included for 1900, the quantities and values for the preceding years not being publicly accessible.

[Illustration: MAKING PALM-OIL]

The chief centres of palm-oil production in the Niger proper as distinct from the Delta, or, in other words, in the territories formerly under the administrative sway of, and still almost entirely tapped in a commercial sense by, the Niger Company are Ogute Lake, Atani, and Onitsha. The Ogute Lake produces about 4500 casks of oil annually; it is connected by the Orashe River, for small craft drawing four feet in the dry season and eight feet in the rainy season, with Degama, but is only open from the Niger River during the rainy season (for craft drawing seven feet) or say from August to the end of December. It is about seventy hours distant from Burutu. Atani yields about 6000 casks per annum. It is open from the sea _viâ_ Burutu or Akassa all the year round. Distance from Burutu about two and a half days. Onitsha will probably exceed before long the other two districts mentioned as a productive centre, the population being very dense; distance from Burutu, three days. For kernels, Assay is the chief centre, producing about 6000 tons annually. It is open all the year round from Burutu for craft drawing about five to five and a half feet, and between July and October the rains permit of navigation for craft drawing up to twelve feet; passage from Burutu, twenty-four hours. Illushi, Idah, Lokoja, Egga, Jebba, and Shongo are other important centres.

The commerce derived from the oil-palm tree, apart from its paramount importance in a commercial sense, has many and varied features of interest. It was, for example, so far as the oil is concerned, the trade which first took the place of the slave traffic. The beverage extracted from it is mentioned in some of the oldest references to the Dark Continent—thus we know that Cambyses “delighted” in its flavour, and Herodotus tells us that amongst the gifts with which he despatched the mission of the Ichthyophagi to Ethiopia was “a cask of palm-wine.” Collecting the palm-tree’s fruit may also be said to be the national industry of the West African Negro almost all along the coast—certainly in Southern Nigeria.[59] It is an industry which permanently employs hundreds of thousands of Negroes, men, women, and children, and gives work to many thousands of white men, from the merchant to the steamship owner, from the manufacturer to the chemist. Often in watching the long files of carts conveying the bulky barrels in which palm-oil is shipped home from the west coast, passing along the Liverpool streets, or the rows upon rows of these casks and heaps of palm-kernel bags piled up on the dock’s side, have I marvelled at the ignorance of those persons who inform us that the native of West Africa will not _work_. Not work, with this testimony to his labours! Not work, when hundreds of English workmen are busy unloading, rolling and carting these proofs of the Negro’s industry every month in the year, every week in the month, every day in the week almost! Not work, when it is borne in mind that this brilliant yellow stuff with the penetrating smell, shipped in hundreds of thousands of gallons from West Africa, is brought down to the coast bit by bit, in small receptacles, often from considerable distances inland, on the heads of these idle and lazy people; that the kernels in those greasy, dirty-looking bags have each been extracted with infinite trouble from an extremely hard shell, that 400 of them are required to make a single pound of kernels, and that the market value in Southern Nigeria of those 400 kernels, to the native, is the maximum sum of one penny! A stone-breaker’s job in this country is not looked upon as a sinecure, but I beg leave to doubt whether the stone-breaker would be content with one penny per every 400 stones he breaks.

[Illustration: DUKE-TOWN, OLD CALABAR, SOUTHERN NIGERIA]

There is not another tree in the whole world which produces money with so little expense as this particular crop. In Nigeria the oil is prepared usually in small quantities, in the small villages scattered over the country. After being prepared, it is in many instances carried by women and children to some central native market, situate as a rule on the edge of a waterway. There it is bought by the middlemen so called, who are really the carriers of the country, and put by them into the casks previously supplied by the European merchants. The casks are packed away in canoes, and the middlemen paddle down through the creeks for distances varying with the length and character of the waterways, to the merchant’s factory at the mouth. The merchant then pays for the oil, gives the middleman an empty cask in exchange for the full one, and ships the latter by the first steamer that comes along, the middlemen coopering it up and making it as sound as possible before starting off on their homeward journey. Palm-oil is used in the manufacture of soap and candles.[60] It is also employed in South Wales and the States in the preparation of tin plates, the plates when white hot being dipped in palm-oil, which gives them their smooth and glassy surface. The demand for palm oil increases annually, and for many years to come is likely to keep up with the supply.

The transaction which takes place between the merchant and the middleman native is the simplest feature of the trade. Before that stage has been reached there are ramifications innumerable. A middleman chief, for instance, will send ten or twelve canoes up the creeks with goods which he has purchased on trust[61]—a large proportion of the trade is still carried out on the trust system, credit being given as between the merchant and the middleman, the middleman and the producer, and again the producer with other producers further afield, the nearest producer becoming thus a middleman or carrier for his more distant countrymen—each of the canoes being in charge of one of his “boys,” with enough men to convey the craft to a certain market. There that particular canoe remains until the goods it has got on board are sold and the canoe is full of oil. The same thing occurs in the case of every market in the district, and so on all over the country, the canoes sometimes remaining several weeks away.

Apart from the porterage, purchase, putting into casks, conveying by water, final sale and shipment, which employs such numbers of natives in their respective _rôles_, there is the collection and preparation to be taken into account before a complete idea can be formed of the varied stages the palm-oil industry goes through until the product is landed on our shores. There is, first of all, the process of climbing the tree to get the fruit, which, of course, is at the top. After removing the fruit the natives are able, when the nut is properly ripe, to shake it out of the spiky casing in which it grows. The nut is something like a plum-stone, only bigger, and contains the oil to the thickness of about one-eighth of an inch. Inside is the kernel, itself enclosed in a very hard shell. To extract the oil the outer skin or shell has to be split or peeled off. The nuts are usually flung into an old canoe, the natives trampling upon and crushing the outer skin, and then put into boiling water, which brings the oil to the surface. But there are a good many ways of preparing the oil, and its different characteristics were at one time supposed to be due to different ways of preparation on various parts of the coast. That does not appear to be the opinion now, for the theory is hardly sufficient to account for the extra quantity of glycerine such as is met with in Bonny and Old Calabar oil, and the larger proportion of stearine[62] which exists in the hard kinds of Brass and New Calabar. We have now come to an end of the history of the collection of palm-oil, and the second use to which the oil-palm lends itself arrives upon the scene.

[Illustration: FILLING PALM-OIL BARRELS, SOUTHERN NIGERIA]

With the breakage of the nut and the extraction of the oil, there is left the kernel in its covering. The kernel trade did not become general[63] until a few years ago, the kernel being usually either left to decay or to reproduce, and for a considerable time it was pointed out that hundreds of thousands of pounds were annually lost in this way. But within a comparatively recent time the natives have been induced to break the hard shell in which the kernel is enclosed, and the latter are shipped home in yearly increasing quantities from Nigeria by the merchants, who dispose of them to the African Oil Mills[64] or some other seed-crushing establishment in Liverpool, or send them to Hamburg: Germany, as already stated, being the largest buyer. The kernel yields an oil which in its concrete form is white in contrast with the yellowy-red or deep red or ochre colouring of the oil in the nut itself, and is the principal ingredient in Sunlight and other soaps of a similar character. In its chemical properties it is almost identical with the oil pressed from the inside of the cocoa-nut—_i.e._ copra—which is known as “cocoa-nut oil.” It is exclusively used in the manufacture of soap.

Owing to the very great labour entailed in cracking the shells, a task generally performed by putting the nut on a stone and breaking it with a stone or stick, and the immense amount of time wasted by so primitive a method, it cannot but be a matter for astonishment that some mechanical contrivance has not been devised and put to general usage whereby the process might be accelerated and facilitated. It is certainly not due to any fear of exhausting the supply by too rapid production, for, so far as any conclusions can be based upon the quantity of oil brought down to the factories, Nigeria is still a long way off producing anything like the full quantity of kernels available. The fact is that several attempts have been made in this direction, but with one exception[65] they have failed, and the failure has discouraged further efforts. Cracking machines of various kinds have been imported, but through neglect, the deadly effect of the West African climate upon machinery of any kind—more especially perhaps in so very humid a part as the Niger Delta—and other causes, they have speedily become “old iron.”

[Illustration: A PALM-KERNEL MARKET IN SOUTHERN NIGERIA]

Although it may seem presumptuous for an outsider to make such a suggestion, I cannot but think that something more might be done, in a systematic and concentrated way, to bring about so great a reform as the cracking of the kernel-shells by machinery could not fail to be; quadrupling as it would the total production, and releasing a large amount of labour, which could be turned into other channels. In view of the very meagre remuneration which the native is willing to accept per pound’s weight of kernels cracked by hand, it is difficult to understand how any real trouble, that decent wages and tactful management were capable of overcoming, could be apprehended in the utilisation of sufficient labour to keep the requisite steam-power at work, more especially as, it is known, the shells would provide a fairly efficient fuel ready to hand. Moreover, would machinery elaborate enough to necessitate steam-power be absolutely essential? Could nothing be invented in the way of importing automatic hand-cracking machines, the cracking taking place under white supervision at the factories, and the middlemen carriers bringing in the undecorticated nut, instead of, as at present, the kernel itself?[66]

There seems to be much need in this great oil-palm industry, as in other native industries in West Africa, of co-operation among the official and commercial classes, which make up the white population—missionaries excepted—for the adoption of some thorough and comprehensive plan of teaching the natives more scientific methods of production. It is no use saying the thing cannot be done. It can be done, and has been done. The most notable example is provided in the history of ground-nut cultivation in Senegal, which has by no means reached perfection,[67] or anything like it, and yet is now realising a million sterling per annum. That striking result was attained by patient, continuous and unflagging perseverance on the part of the Bordeaux merchants, coupled with the friendly support and assistance of the Government, without coercion of any kind. It took some time, of course, but the results have thoroughly justified the policy pursued, and Senegal to-day[68] is the foremost vegetable-oil producing country in the world. We hear a great deal about technical education in West Africa, carpentering, brick-making, and so forth, all very admirable in their way, but the time and money spent in these directions could be more profitably engaged by perfecting the _existing native industries_ of West Africa, and by creating new ones, which would do more than anything else to increase the prosperity of the country, and at the same time be based upon sound science, for the natural instincts and aptitude of the Negro are pre-eminently agricultural. Far more lasting good could be achieved thus.

Officials and merchants working side by side for a common aim, and science—that is what West Africa needs. What a reflection it is upon our Administration in West Africa, that the commercial position of Sierra Leone, for instance, should be declining, year by year, largely owing to a passion for keeping up a form of taxation which is repugnant to the natives, and does not even pay the cost of collection, when thousands of pounds annually are wasted in the Sherbro district alone by the natives merely collecting the kernels, leaving the oil to rot off—all for want of encouragement, and the teaching of scientific methods of production, while acres upon acres of rubber-producing land in Lagos have been impaired by a similar absence of preliminary common sense. Perhaps the most curious feature of the whole business is that which consists in turning round and blaming the native for wilful destruction which—in the latter case mentioned—he was never taught how to avoid. If the oil-palm industry were taken in hand in practical fashion, there is no possible doubt that an enormous development would ensue. But while the want of sympathy and combination, one might almost say the latent opposition, between the official and merchant class continues, I cannot see that matters will be different to what they are. The remedy lies very largely with the Authorities.