ON THE CULTURE OP THE GROUND-NUT, ETC. 527 



ON THE CULTURE OF THE GROUND-NUT IN GAMBIA, 

 WESTERN AFRICA. 



BY HIS EXCELLENCY GOVERNOR D'aRCY. 



The ground-nut, our staple product, is principally cultivated down the 

 borders of the river, and in British Combo by the Serrawoolies. They 

 are a nomadic tribe of Mahommedan fanners of the Senegambia ; they 

 leave their 'wives and children' far up the country, and wander to the 

 seaboard in search of fallow ground, to be left again as soon as the crops 

 have worn out the soil. The native has unfortunately introduced, of late 

 years, the pernicious system of beating, or threshing, instead of picking by 

 hand, whereby the nuts are mixed with leaves, stalks, stones, and other 

 extraneous substances, causing large deductions in the French market, 

 and depreciating their value in the United States as an article of food, or, 

 better to be described, a favourite dessert for the tables of the rich in the 

 latter country. The resident native, the Jolloffe, or the liberated 

 African, surrounded by his Lares et Penates, in the shape of women, 

 children, and domestic servants, or slaves, takes his time to pick the nuts, 

 so saving the grass for the Bathurst market, where it meets with ready 

 sale as fodder for horses ; whereas the Serrawoolie, who is anxious for 

 quick returns, has not the time, and certainly not the energy, to pick two 

 acres of ground-nuts between December and May, and which he can 

 easily dress, work, and sow in June and November, thereby losing the 

 fodder, but bringing a larger quantity of nuts to the market. I have 

 endeavoured most earnestly to counteract this banefid mode of harvest- 

 ing, not' only in British Combo, but in the other parts of the country ; 

 for if it continues, it will lower the reputation hitherto enjoyed by the 

 Gambia over the nuts exported from the neighbouring rivers of the Casa- 

 mance, Jeba, the Rio Grande, and Sierra Leone. 



I take every occasion to urge upon the natives most seriously the ne- 

 cessity of not solely relying on the ground-nut ; it is a very precarious 

 staple for a community only to depend on. I dread some day a famine, 

 not to the extent of the suffering in Ireland from the potato disease, for 

 sufficient corn is certainly grown to keep life from season to season, but, 

 I fear they will lose all their comforts, such as warm clothes, tobacco, 

 rum, &c, from their inability to purchase dry goods, owing to the nut be- 

 coming a drug in the market, from more causes than one ; a French re- 

 volution for instance, as in 1848, left the exportation of the nut only to 

 the States and Great Britain, leaving thousands of tons on hand, not to 

 speak of the loss the colony will suffer from the absence of the tonnage 

 dues. We shall then only have to fall back on our old articles of hides, 

 wax, and ivory, which is a failing trade. 



The reflection is very serious to one who studies the interests of the 

 Gambia colony, in particular, and difficult to remedy, unless Providence 

 in its mercy supplies some hitherto unknown or unappreciated article of 



