LOSERS^503British employes had enough money to buy the natives out of food,
and the natives in turn got jobs with the project and gave up traditional
cultivation. So food production went down and large amounts had to
be imported to feed those who were supposed to be producing a sur
plus for export. Liquor came in too; and prostitutes, charging "stu
pendous fees of five shillings and more";^22 and thieves—all the
afflictions and corruptions of unexpected wealth. Meanwhile the
British tried to teach the natives the virtues of working-class solidarity
and equality. The natives saw this as a subversion of order and moral
ity.
By 1950, failure was inescapable; time now for remorse and liqui
dation. The groundnut does not lend itself to mass cultivation. Eco
nomic yields require intensive farming. The plan to grow in huge
30,000 acre units proved utterly impractical. It took four years to dis
pose of the equipment and installations. The British turned as much as
possible over to the government of newly independent Tanganyika,
which saw these ill-favored leftovers as nuisance more than assets. It
wasn't hard for observers to note that the money could have been put
to better use.
Needless to say, the fiasco hurt British prestige and discouraged
other "imaginative schemes of economic development." Would these
have done better? The record is not encouraging, except to ever re
newable planners and technicians, who seem to use these projects as
children might a dollhouse, and who learn with every failure. I would
not depreciate the motives and deeds of these experts. They remain our
hope for large-scale, long-range amelioration. Yet nothing is more ine
briating and seductive than making a world and feeling virtuous for it.
In the end, the British shrugged the failure off. The nation was tired
and had better things to worry about than peanuts in Africa.
The British groundnut scheme was not the exception. Colonial gov
ernments were liable to these temptations, which held out the irre
sistible promise of doing well while doing good. The French tried for
cotton on the Niger River, upstream from Timbuktu (today Mali),
from the 1910s to the 1940s. Again Africa was to supply European
needs—this time the potential demand by French spinners, pressed to
find precious dollars for American cotton. The colonial administrators
involved were concerned to protect their African constituents, even
against themselves, while ensuring a supply of raw cotton that could
compete on the world market. The French also wanted to preserve
freedom of enterprise where possible. So, with consummate Gallic
logic, they came up with a compromise formula: the peasants had a