Нигерия: народы и проблемы - страница 5

The Great White Road. It thoroughly deserves that title from the point where one enters the Kano Province coming from Zaria. It is there not only a great white road but a very fine one, bordered on either side by a species of eucalyptus, and easily capable, so far as breadth is concerned, of allowing the passage of two large automobiles abreast. I, personally, should not care to own the automobile which undertook the journey, because the road is not exactly what we would call up-to-date. Thank Heaven that there is one part of the world, at least, to be found where neither roads, nor ladies’ costumes are “up-to-date.” If the Native Administration of the Kano Emirate had nothing else to be commended for, and under the tactful guidance of successive Residents it has an increasing account to its credit, the traveller would bear it in grateful recollection for its preservation of the trees in the immediate vicinity of, and sometimes actually on the Great White Road itself. It is difficult to over-estimate the value to man and beast, to the hot and dusty European, to the weary-footed carrier, to the patient pack-ox, and cruelly-bitted native horse, of the occasional shady tree at the edge of or on the road. And what magnificent specimens of the vegetable kingdom the fertile soil of Kano Province does carry—our New Forest giants, though holding their own for beauty and shape and, of course, clinging about our hearts with all their wealth of historical memories and inherited familiarity, would look puny in comparison. With one exception I do not think anything on the adverse side of trivialities has struck me more forcibly out here than the insane passion for destroying trees which seems to animate humanity, White and Black. In many parts of the country I have passed through the African does appear to appreciate his trees, both as shade for his ordinary crops and special crops (such as pepper, for instance, which you generally find planted under a great tree) and cattle. In Kano Province, for instance, this is very noticeable. But in other parts he will burn down his trees, or rather let them burn down, with absolute equanimity, making no effort to protect them (which on many occasions he could easily do) when he fires the grasses (which, pace many learned persons, it seems to me, he is compelled by his agricultural needs to do—I speak now of the regions I have seen). I have noticed quantities of splendid and valuable timber ruined in this way. The European—I should say some Europeans—appears to suffer from the same complaint. It is the fashion—if the word be not disrespectful, and Heaven forfend that the doctors should be spoken of disrespectfully in this part of the world, of all places—among the new school of tropical medicine out here to condemn all growing things in a wholesale manner. In the eyes of some, trees or plants of any kind in the vicinity of a European station are ruthlessly condemned. Others are specially incensed against low shrubs. Some are even known to pronounce the death-warrant of the pine-apple, and I met an official at a place, which shall be nameless, who went near weeping tears of distress over a fine row of this fruit which he had himself planted, and which were threatened, as he put it, by the ferocity of the local medical man. In another place destruction hangs over a magnificent row of mango trees—and for beauty and luxuriousness of foliage the mango tree is hard to beat—planted many years ago by the Roman Catholic Fathers near one of their mission stations; and in still another, an official, recently returned on leave, found to his disgust that a group of trees he especially valued had been cut down during his absence by a zealous reformer of the medical world.