E.— GEOGRAPHY'. 121 



Christianity must inevitably sooner or later affect not only the sanctions 

 behind native political authority, but also the whole moral order associated 

 with that authority. 



In the coast towns of West Africa, where European contact has been 

 established for a longer period than elsewhere in Tropical Africa, we 

 observe this decay in tribal authority and the development of the individual 

 in its highest degree. A very large proportion of the population of these 

 towns is completely de-tribalised and no longer bears any allegiance to 

 a native authority. 



Some people go even farther than that, and describe these individuals 

 as ' denationalised.' That is to say, we are witnessing the rise of a new 

 community of people who have thrown off all their ancestral traditions 

 and are engaged in imitating Western civilisation as fast as they can. 

 Certainly the demand for Western education, particularly Western 

 literary education, creates a most formidable problem, and throws special 

 responsibilities on Government and missionaries alike in providing the 

 right type of education for the African with his special characteristics, 

 still living in Africa but in a new and rapidly changing environment. 



Hitherto we have been perhaps too easily content to give the African 

 a mere veneer of the nineteenth-century English Board-school education, 

 without studying the real needs of the people or the right methods of 

 bringing out their innate capacity on modern scientific lines. This is 

 why a great experiment like the Prince of Wales College, Achimota, in 

 the Gold Coast, is fraught with so much interest not only for that Colony 

 but for Africa as a whole. 



There are so many disruptive tendencies at work in Africa to-day that 

 constructive thinking is urgently needed if the African communities are 

 not to be reduced by our impact to the condition of disorganised mobs 

 drifting about without leadership and without any clear goal before them 

 except the new desire to acquire personal wealth. 



I turn now to another aspect of the problem. Both deliberately and 

 also unconsciously we are teaching the African the mastery of new arts 

 and crafts, new methods of agriculture, and in some cases entirely new 

 methods of life. In Tropical Africa we are forced, by the difficulty and 

 expense of running things like railways with European staffs unsuited 

 to the climatic conditions, to develop the skill of the African. He is 

 being trained to become an engine-driver, a fitter, a mechanic, a stone- 

 mason and a carpenter. Every year he is being entrusted with the 

 management of more and more complex machinery, and every year sees 

 an increase in the number of quite highly skilled African industrial crafts- 

 men. Our recent experience shows that the African can very readily 

 acquire skill in the mechanical arts and is capable of becoming an industrial 

 craftsman of quite a high order. 



Thus we are training up a new African labour class of wage-earners, 

 for the most part in the employ of the various Government Departments, 

 but in West Africa also in the employ of the mining companies and in 

 East Africa in the employ of the European, farmer settlers. 



In the old Africa wage labour was largely unknown. Compulsory 

 labour for communal purposes was a fairly general rule, while in many 

 places, particularly in West Africa and those parts of East Africa which 



