THE LAND QUESTION IN TOGOLAND.
Sir Hugh Clifford, K. C. M. G., Governor and Commander in Chief of the Gold Coast, declares that the German colonial administration confiscated extensive tracts of land, the property of the natives, in favour of German planters, and that it urged upon the natives the acceptance of sums of money for this land, as well as forced them by threats of flogging to work upon the confiscated lands — a system which came near to being regular slavery.
This presentation is in all points a misleading one and dictated by malice and calumny.
Once again Clifford makes use of a slippery subterfuge. He ventures to apply the Native L,and Laws which are in vogue in the southern part of the Gold Coast Colony and in Ashanti, but are not recognized even in the northern part of this colony, indiscriminately to the whole of Africa and to Togoland where other laws and views were operative. There exists in Southern Togoland no tribal land which may be sold by the chiefs in the name of their tribes. All land in that district is personal property, or is divided among the various clans, and only the elders of these clans are entitled to dispose of it by sale. But great tracts of land to which no one lays claim exist side by side with those pre-empted. There are no fixed lines of demarcation between the districts occupied by hostile tribes, but merely zones of uninhabited wilderness. But even within the inhabited tribal districts there was so much room that the concept of property, especially the concept of landed pro-
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