The indigenous crafts of West Africa are so primitive in comparison with the mechanized industries of Europe that they may easily be omitted from schemes for future progress. Plans have been suggested for the extensive development of backward areas such as Nigeria as part of the post-war aim of the expansion of world trade. Large measures of social reconstruction, together with the starting of new industries and the improvement of old have been advocated in order that poverty may be lessened and the equipment of public services increased. Of many of these schemes there is no doubt that, if they were possible of achievement, industrial organizations would be set up that would have no relationship to African life as it is now. Experts in materials and industrial processes are not usually interested in sociological questions, nor are they accustomed to take them into account. They are concerned with efficiency, and have only to satisfy themselves that there is a sufficient supply of labour which is capable of manipulating machinery. Experts in the science of economics, for their part, have to decide whether there will be a market for the products of new or improved industries and therefore must necessarily examine some aspects of the life of the people in the area which they are studying. But the predominating factors of advertisement and price enable them to disregard deeper questions of cultural disintegration. Yet thorny questions would eventually arise upon which Africans would have decided opinions: such as the use of land for the exploitation of minerals, and the ownership and control of industries. The supply of labour might at first appear to Africans an innocuous, even a beneficial function, but later it might be discovered that the movement of workers into industrial towns was undermining the whole basis of their society

In recent years increasing attention has been given to the question of developing small-scale industries in the Colonial Dependencies. It is now generally agreed that such a development is essential in the interests of the territories themselves and for the ultimate benefit of Great Britain and, the world. So enthusiastic indeed has been the acceptance of this new policy that there is now a danger that adequate attention may not be given to the needs of the local communities themselves, the service of which is the main justification for the establishment of these industries. However important it may be for world prosperity that the purchasing power of the peoples of Africa should be raised, it is no less important that every scheme of industrialization should be related to the requirements of the peoples of Africa, and the organization of the industries must be in harmony with local traditions. If this is not done the new industries, whether they are built up on local traditional crafts or are completely ‘exotic’, may prove to be socially disruptive. Every development of this kind has social and political consequences which are as important as the economic results, and which may, indeed, override financial and economic considerations. An increase in the material prosperity of Africa would be paid for too highly if the price should prove to be the disintegration of African society.

There is a tendency in some quarters to regard secondary industries as a panacea for all the economic ills of tropical Africa. It would be well at this initial stage to sound a note of warning. In the past, the industrialization of agricultural countries has had two results: one good, one bad. On the one hand, the establishment in a country of labour-saving machinery and large-scale production in place of the old laborious method of making things by hand has led to a rise in the general standard of living within the country in terms of real incomes. On the other hand, the drift of workers to the towns and the herding together of large numbers of people in factories resulted in the sum of social evils associated with the ‘dark satanic mills’: overcrowding, sweated labour, destitution, unemployment, and many more. The problem for tropical Africa to-day is to combine the maximum of the first and good effect with a minimum of the second evil.

Dans un volume publié en 1942 par le Haut Commissariat de l'Afrique Française, L'Afrique Occidentak Françalse en 1942, j'écrivais, en tête du chapitre consacré à l'Institut d'Afrique: ' L'équipement de ce qu'il est convenu d'appeler un pays neuf n'est pas fait que de rails, de camions et d'usines. L'édifice africain aura, on le sait aujourd'hui, plusieurs façades et les constructeurs, déjà, commencent, dans leurs plans, à en tenir compte. La politique et l'économie ont leur place, la science aura la sienne, la vie intellectuelle et spirituelle aurqnt la leur.

As a rule the effort to revive the vanishing art of the people in European countries has met with failure. Popular artistic handicraft is the result of the native material needs of the folk, as well as of their spiritual need for expression in the production of beautiful things. When the life of a tribe which has achieved through the centuries a harmonious equilibrium and unity becomes violently disturbed by outside influences, the chances of preserving the original manual arts are diminished or indeed lost.

The many different peoples of the Soviet Union have certain traditional handicrafts, and the Soviet administration is fostering them. Their practice is growing rapidly, and the products are every year appearing in much greater quantities and spreading more widely over the Union as a whole. There are two large shops in Moscow dealing solely in native peasant handicrafts. Their goods come from all over the Soviet Union, and they do a roaring trade although prices are by no means low. A Russian friend of mine bought a charming set of carved mammoth-tusk chess-pieces, made in the Arctic; the pawns were reindeer, the king a hunter, the queen an old nanny, the castles nomad tents, and so on. He paid a thousand roubles, which at that time—1935—represented about six weeks' average Russian income. At the present exchange rate it would be about £40. The set was worth quite that much.