SEGREGATION 



269 



the principle of segregation. In two instances, 

 however, this has been carried out in towns, with 

 the result that the segregated communities of 

 Europeans are notoriously the most healthy on the 

 West Coast. Even when no scheme of complete 

 segregation can be carried out, the principle should 

 always be borne in mind, and, whenever opportunity 

 offers, huts should be removed, and European houses 

 built in the open. . . . It is almost universally the 

 rule in West Africa to find European houses built 

 round by native quarters, a practice which long 

 experience in India has taught Europeans to avoid 

 carefully. At Old Calabar, many of the factories 

 are almost surrounded, except in front, by native 

 habitations ; similarly, at Egwanga, the small 

 native town is built by the side and back of one of 

 the factories. Also at the Niger Company's factory 

 at Lokoja, the native houses are very close up to the 

 Company's boundary railings. Akassa engineers' 

 quarters may be, again, mentioned as an example 

 where the engineering artisans, chiefly natives of 

 Lagos, Accra, and Sierra Leone, are housed with 

 their families alongside the European house. A 

 large proportion of these native children were found 

 by us to contain malarial parasites. Similarly also 

 at Asaba, the proximity of the barracks of the 

 Hausa soldiers, who have their wives and children 

 with them, is a dangerous menace to the officers at 

 the Force House. 



" Examples of the opposite condition of affairs 

 might also be given. For instance, at Old Calabar, 

 the Government offices and Consulate, Vice- 

 consulate, and medical house, are comparatively free 

 from malarial fever ; it having been established that 

 the natives shall not build on the European side of 

 the creek separating the two slopes on which the 



