From the banks of the Congo to Kamerun is not a very far cry as
distances go in Africa. Kamerun is under the German flag, and a German
writer, Hugo Zöller, has described life in that colony with the eyes
of a shrewd observer. What he says about the negro's capacity for love
shows deep psychological insight (III., 68-70):
"Europeans residing in Africa who have married a negro
woman declare unanimously that there is no such thing
there as love and fidelity in the European sense. It
happens with infinitely greater frequency that a
European falls in love with his black companion than
she with him; or rather the latter does not happen at
all. A hundred times I have listened to discussions of
this topic in many different places, but I have never
heard of a single case of a genuine full-blooded
negress falling in love with a white man.... The
stupidest European peasant girl is, in comparison with
an African princess, still an ideally endowed being."
Zöller adds that in all his African experiences he never found a
negress of whom he should have been willing to assume that she would
sacrifice herself for a man she was attached to. On another page he
says:
"A negro woman does not fall in love in the same sense
as a European, not even as the least civilized peasant
girl. Love, in our sense of the word, is a product of
our culture belonging to a higher stage in the
development of latent faculties than the negro race has
reached. Not only is the negro a stranger to the
diverse intellectual and sentimental qualities which we
denote by the name of love: nay, even in a purely
bodily sense it may be asserted that his nervous system
is not only less sensitive, but less well-developed.
The negro loves as he eats and drinks.... And just as
little as a black epicure have I ever been able to
discover a negro who could rise to the imaginative
phases of amorous dalliance. A negro ... may buy dozens
upon dozens of wives without ever being drawn by an
overpowering feeling to any one of them. Love is, among
the blacks, as much a matter of money as the palm oil
or ivory trade. The black man buys his wife when she is
still a child; when she reaches the age at which our
maidens go to their first ball, her nervous system,
which never was particularly sensitive anyway, is
completely blunted, so that she takes it as a matter of
course to be sold again and again as a piece of
property. One hears often enough of a 'woman palaver,'
which is regarded exactly like a 'goat palaver,' as a
damage to property, but one never, positively never,
hears of a love-affair. The negress never has a
sweetheart, either in her youngest days or after her
so-called marriage. She is regarded, and regards
herself, as a piece of property and a beast of burden."