Germany's Vanishing Colonies by Gordon Le Sueur

Author:Gordon Le Sueur [Sueur, Gordon Le]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Nonfiction, Reference & Language, Reference, Fiction & Literature, Classics
ISBN: 4064066155018
Google: _B40AAAAIAAJ
Goodreads: 18329056
Publisher: Good Press
Published: 2021-05-19T04:00:00+00:00

The coffee produced by the natives is either collected from the trees which grow wild or by cultivating the indigenous plants. The wild coffee has a small misshapen bean, but is excellently flavoured, the quality of the bean improving with each year of keeping. The value of coffee exported amounts to about £100,000 per annum.

On the highlands oats, barley, and wheat are grown successfully; and other articles of export are hides and skins, coming chiefly from the district round Lake Victoria and from the provinces of Ruanda and Urundi, which abound with millions of head of cattle and other live stock.

The slopes of the highlands are covered with short sweet grass, and are well watered with perennial streams, which might easily be diverted into channels to irrigate the land below.

Though sheep do well in parts, the grass in the main grows too coarse for any small stock, and requires feeding down.

The cattle are still nearly all in the hands of the natives, but the Germans turned the hides to profit, £200,000 worth having been exported in 1912.

The exportation of cattle is prohibited, but traders from Rhodesia have made their way up into German East Africa, where they traded cattle from the natives at prices averaging about 40s., and managed to return with large herds of the quaint "hump-backed" beasts, known as "Madagascar cattle," to southern Rhodesia, where they found a ready market at an average price of about £7, 10s.

Horses do fairly well in parts of the country only, but a small variety of extremely hardy and strong donkey is plentiful; and these are most useful for transport work, being able it seems to live on the memory of a pannikin of maize, and capable of being packed with any weight.

The cultivation of chillies and pea-nuts is exclusively a native industry, and the export of pea-nuts in 1912 amounted to £62,500.

The collection of palm-oil and copra, too, is in native hands, the nuts being collected from the wild palms which grow in their thousands on the coast belts.

The European planters in recent years commenced cocoa-nut palm cultivation, but the million trees planted have not yet come to maturity.

Gum-copal, the resin of an indigenous tree, used for varnishing, and the wax of wild bees is also collected by the natives in the forests, and the export of beeswax in recent years has averaged about £50,000.

This system of collection by natives means the reduction of economic resources, as in collecting wild rubber the vines are destroyed and so are the swarms of bees in the search for wax.

There are other trees capable of commercial exploitation, such as the baobab (cream of tartar tree), cazou, the nuts of which are largely exported from Jamaica, and wattle, the bark of which produces tannin.

The timber possibilities are great, as large forests of cedar exist and a certain amount has been exported.

The geological formation is similar to British East Africa; and although prospecting for minerals is not encouraged, gold in payable quantities has been discovered and worked, and gold to the value of about £30,000 has been exported annually for some years.

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