The Native as Cultivator
“Bunches of fruit having been severed from the parent tree, are sliced and hammered by natives, using long poles, until the fruit becomes detached from the bunch. The fresh fruit is either prepared at once into what is called soft oil, or allowed to ferment, or partially ferment, and made into hard oil. The procedure followed in making either of these kinds of oil is much the same. The fruit is placed either into canoes or clay troughs, water is poured over them, and then, by treading or beating, the fibrous matter containing the oil is separated from the nuts. The nuts are then taken out and placed in the sun to dry, while the fibrous matter, by further beating or treading, is made to yield the oil which floats to the surface of the water. This oil is ladled out into pots and boiled, and then allowed to rest, so that all dirt or sediment falls to the bottom of the pot. This clean oil, soft or hard, is the palm oil of commerce. This oil is taken in calabashes or tins to the traders’ factory, which, generally speaking, is near to a river or a railway, and there put into casks and sent to the nearest port for shipment to Europe.
“There are, practically speaking, two kinds of palm oil exported from the West Coast, i.e., hard and soft, but soft oil is of two qualities—Lagos and ordinary soft oil. As a rule, Lagos and soft oil is worth £3 to £4 more than hard oil, the reason being that there is about 8 per cent. more glycerine in the soft than in the hard. The percentage of glycerine varies in inverse proportion with the acidity.
“In the olden days one of the chief occupations of slaves was that of cracking palm nuts; now this work is left to boys and women. After the nuts have been dried in the sun, they are heaped up under little sheds to protect them from the rain. In places where rocks are plentiful the nuts are taken there and cracked on them by a stone held in the hand of the cracker. In other places the nuts are put on a block of wood resting on the ground between the cracker’s legs and struck with a piece of iron held in the cracker’s right hand. In this way one worker will crack from 15 lbs. to 25 lbs. of kernels per day. The kernels are then packed in different kinds of baskets and taken to markets near rivers, where they are bought by native middlemen. Competition is very keen, and so these middlemen are tempted to adulterate the kernels by adding shells to them or by soaking them in water for two or three days. Finally, they are taken in canoes down rivers or by rail to the European traders and sold by measurement at so much a bushel.... Think of it! 241,000 tons of palm kernels shipped to Hamburg in 1913, and nearly every nut containing one kernel is cracked by hand.”