ON THE GOLD COAST

Greymouth Evening Star, 13 May 1933, Page 11

ON THE GOLD COAST

WHERE NOBODY STARVES. The Rev. P. B. Clayton, founder of Toe H, who recently returned to London from a Toe H campaign in the Gold Coast and Nigeria, gave some of his impressions to the “Sunday Times.” “My impressions? They aren’t depressions!” he said. “We had a good time in a bad climate. “A tour of duty for eighteen months or two years is long enough to test the fittest European. However, it is no longer the ‘White Man’s Grave’ it was when Mary Kingsley was told on the way out that a real West Coaster got all his clothes mildewed except his black coat for funerals which he used every day. “The natives? They are more or less contented, although the times are hard for many of them. The country is uniquely fertile, and being unemployed is not so bad where clothes don’t matter and you can’t go hungry. A native paper in Lagos started a fund for the unemployed in England, explaining how bad things are in the cold north. Seeing that native wages are about 6d to 1/- per day, I thought this good. * “Pidgin-English is rightly going out of use, but some expressive phrases still remain. ‘Dejobulated’ is quite neat for those axed. ‘Pyjama-house’ for a small bag is pleasing. A thing that has been mislaid is spoken of ‘I look ’em, but I no see ’em.’ “The British rule is trusted to be just by everyone except the native lawyer. We now need force only occasionally to prevent old tribal enemies producing trouble.

SEVEN TOC H UNITS. “The British and Toe H? That’s what I went for. All were agreed, including most of the missionaries, that Toe H must, on the West Coast, be for British. But French and Dutch and German members are in it all right, and there are now seven units going strong. “Accra and Lagos both have good headquarters; indeed, at Lagos we have been so fortunate, thanks to the Governor, as to obtain the use of a first-rate house with residential quarters.

“The progress made against disease in the short years of British occupation is an inspiring item in our record; nor can a man feel anything but proud of the whole British atmosphere of justice, common sense and cheerfulness.

“The native peoples, who would otherwise be in a state of internecine war, are given a surprising measure of self-government, and are influenced more than ruled. Their attitude to. wards the British is, ■in consequence, friendly, with the rarest exceptions, and even in the furthest bush the District Officers carry no arms. “Behind a small force of police stands a still smaller force of native troops skippered by British officers and British N.C.O.s. Less than one full brigade of infantry composes the fighting forces for both colonies, assisted by a single light battery. “This forms a strange contrast to the enormous forces, said to be over two million men, drilled by the French in their North British empire. No one could view the British situation as it now stands in the Gold Coast and in Nigeria without it favourably with those of other European races.

“The one experiment in an African republic, Liberia, is sufficient answer to those strange idealists who think that the native is already capable of self-government. “The deepest impression left upon my mind is the amelioration brought about in West Africa by the presence of the British women, wives, doctors and nurses, and educationalists, whose coming to the Coast now in large numbers has altered the whole atmosphere.” .