Нигерия: народы и проблемы - страница 23

No sketch, however brief, of the potentialities of the Nigerian forest belt would be complete without a reference to the labours of the Forestry Department, which owes its initiation to the foresight and statesmanship of the late Sir Ralph Moor. Such reference is the more necessary since the work of the department crystallizes, so to speak, the conception of its duties towards the native population which guides the Administration’s policy. No other department of the Administration reveals so clearly by its whole programme and its daily practice what the fundamental object of British policy in Nigeria really is, and in view of the increasing assaults upon that policy by company promoters at home, on the one hand, and the obstacles to which its complete realization is subjected in Africa on the other, it is absolutely essential that public opinion in Britain should become acquainted with the facts and be in a position to support the Colonial Office and the Administration in combining equity with commonsense.

Briefly stated, the Forestry Department is designed to conserve forest resources for the benefit of the State—the State meaning, in practice, the native communities owning the land and their descendants, and the Administration charged with their guardianship, and while encouraging any legitimate private enterprise, whether European or native, to oppose the wholesale exploitation of those resources for the benefit of individuals, white or black. It aims at impressing the native with the economic value of his forests as a source of present and continual revenue for himself and his children; at inducing native communities to give the force of native law to its regulations and by their assistance in applying them, to prevent destruction through indiscriminate farming operations and bush fires, to prevent the felling of immature trees, to replant and to start communal plantations. It aims at the setting aside, with the consent of the native owners, of Government reserves and native reserves, and at furthering industrial development by private enterprise under conditions which shall not interfere with the general welfare of the country. In a word, the Forestry Department seeks to associate the native communities with the expanding values of the land in which they dwell, so that for them the future will mean increasing prosperity and wealth, the essence of the policy being that these communities are not only by law and equity entitled to such treatment, but that any other would be unworthy of British traditions. It is what some persons call maudlin sentiment, the sort of “maudlin sentiment” which stands in the way of the Nigerian native being expropriated and reduced to the position of a hired labourer on the properties of concessionnaires under whose patriotic activities the Nigerian forest would be exploited until it had disappeared from the face of the earth like the forests of Wisconsin, Michigan, Minnesota, and Eastern Canada.

Apart from the question of safeguarding the rights of the people of the land, our wards, the necessity of forest conservation in the interest of the public weal has been taught by bitter experience, and experience has also shown that scientific forestry can only be profitably undertaken by the Government or by bodies whose first obligation is the interest and protection of the community. The Forestry Department of Southern Nigeria, short as its existence has been, is already a revenue-making Department, for in the last ten years it has either planted, or induced the natives to plant, trees (some of which, like the rubber trees in Benin, are now beginning to bear) whose present estimated value is £287,526, and has thus added over a quarter of a million to the value of the capital stock of the forests without taking into account the indirect effects of the steps taken to help their natural regeneration. The Department has many local difficulties to contend with, especially in the Western province, which I shall have occasion to discuss in connection with the general administrative problem facing the administration in that section of the Protectorate.