NOVEL PROJECT FOR THE CONGO.

Waikato Times, Volume XXXIV, Issue 2760, 22 March 1890, Page 5 (Supplement)

NOVEL PROJECT FOR THE CONGO.

AccouutNG to information which a correspondent Ins gathered at the most authentic source, a novel attempt is about to he made on the Congo. As there is no serious hope of ever rearing a real colony of white men in such a climato, the idea lins li-jum mooted of drafting into the Congo dominion a number of young and welleducated negroes from the United States, to serve as educators of their backward and uncivilised brethren in Africa. An American gentleman who has been in Belgium for some time has submitted this plan to King Leopold and to the Congo trading companies having their seat in Brussels, and his project having met with great encouragement, lie recently returned to the Status, and during a flying visit there visited the industrial colleges of the South, and made arrangement') for a competition of negro students, the twenty-four ino<t eliicient of whom will, after examination, be sent to the Congo as employes, skilled labourers, &c., to give instruction to the natives. Should the experiment succeed and the American coloured people prove, as expected, a better instrument of civilisation than the whites, a general emigration of the blacks from America to their African cradle-land will he encouraged. The example set by the Congo will probably be followed by tli-s British East African Association, ami possibly by the Germans,