The Sanders Saga.
 By J. SYKES.
 (Presidential Address for the year 1938-1939). (')


 I. Introductory.
 The "Sanders Saga" of Edgar Wallace may not be thought worthy to rank
with the "Forsyte Saga" of John Galsworthy or with the "Herries Saga" of Hugh
Walpole, but it is a Saga nevertheless.
 It consists of one hundred and twenty-nine short stories and one complete
 novel, all dealing with the activities and experiences of Mr. Commissioner
 Sanders, better known as "Sanders of the River," as ruler, under the British
 Crown, of a certain group of Native Territories in West Central Africa.
 In the whole of them I can find but three references to Uganda, two to
Tanganyika, and two to Kenya. It cannot therefore be said that they have any
direct concern with East Africa, or a direct interest to its present-day inhabitants.
 They have, however, an indirect interest, and that for two reasons.
 The first of these is that the African peoples whom they describe are intended,
as will be explained later, to be peoples of a Bantu type, and speaking Bantu
languages.
 The second is that, though, as is perhaps inevitable in any work of fiction
dealing with such a subject, and more particularly if the author is a journalist,
there is much that is sensational and much that is purely fantastic, there is also
a -certain amount which may be claimed to reflect a reasonably faithful picture
of African society at a certain stage of development, and of the problems of
Colonial Administration in contact with such a society a generation or so ago.
 I should perhaps make it clear at the outset that, though in what follows I
have taken Sanders as a kind of hero and he is the last man in the world whom
I would wish to debunk, this does not mean that I am thereby expressing ap-
proval of all that he did. Rather do I share the common thankfulness that that
stage of Empire-building in Africa which the regime of Sanders represents,
has passed, or almost passed, away. And I would further claim that Sanders
himself, though he usually found the problems of the present sufficiently urgent,
was not unmindful also of the future, and fully realized that his primary duty
was to lead his people, albeit slowly, up to better things, and to lay solid foundat-
ions on which his successors were to build. No more than Moses could he hope
himself to enter the promised land.

 (i) Delivered at the Kampala Club on January I8th. 1939g