Publisher's Synopsis
Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: CHAPTER IV. West African Transportation?Negroes as Pack-Horses. THE necessity of transporting merchandise into the interior of Africa arises from the fact that no money currency is available there, because the natives demand in payment for their services as laborers European articles, such as cloth, knives, hoes, salt, brass wire, or sea shells. Their labor is needed in building houses, clearing the forests, cultivating the soil, and housekeeping. Moreover, these goods are demanded in exchange for native produce, such as corn, vegetables, fowls, eggs, sheep, pigs and goats. It is true that after a good start of about three years is made upon a plantation, comparatively little of these imported goods ought to be needed by missionaries or colonists who pay large attention to gardening and agriculture. But the traders who buy rubber and ivory, or plant coffee, the government officials who are engaged in military affairs, and the missionary who plants nothing must always need these imported supplies, the transportation of which to the remote interior has always been such a heavy item of expense and annoyance. For this reason the steamboat and railway are tremendous forces for civilization, and add greatly to the efficiency of moral, religious and educational efforts. The averagesettler needs about three thousand pounds of imported goods per year, for the first three years, and at least one thousand annually thereafter for personal use, until agriculture and manufactures are well established. The trader needs about ten tons, sometimes disposing of as much as thirty tons. Until the steamboat and railway came, all this transportation was done on the heads of the native Africans. It was a heavy burden for them, and was a potent factor in causing the slave trade, besides leadin...
