possessions, the trade returns, with the balance all on the wrong
side, clearly show; still he does know how to get possession of
Africa better than we do, and this means he knows how to deal with
the natives. The building up of Congo Francais, for example, has
not cost one-third of the human lives, black or white, that an
equivalent quantity of Congo Belge has, nor one-third of the expense
of Uganda or Sierra Leone. It is customary in England to dwell on
the commercial failure, and deduce from it the erroneous conclusion
that France will soon leave it off when she finds it does not pay.
This is an error, because commercial success--the making the thing
pay--is not the French ideal in the affair. It is our own, and I am
the last person to say our ideal is wrong; but it is not the French
ideal, and I am the last person to say France is wrong either.
There may exist half a hundred or more right reasons for doing
anything, and the reasons France has for her energetic policy in
Africa are sound ones; for they are the employment of her martial
spirits where their activity will not endanger the State, the
stowing of these spirits in Paris having been found to be about as
advisable as stowing over-proof spirits and gunpowder in a living-
room with plenty of lighted lucifers blazing round; and her other
reason is the opportunity African enterprise affords for sound
military training. You will often hear in England regarding French
annexation in Africa, "Oh! let her have the deadly hole, and much
good may it do her." France knows very well what good it will do
her, and she will cheerfully take all she is allowed to get quietly,
as a sop for her quietness regarding Egypt, and she will cheerfully
fight you for the rest--small blame to her. She knows Africa is a
superb training ground for her officers. Sham fights and autumn
manoeuvres have a certain value in the formation of a fighting army,
but the whole of these parlour-games, put together in a ten-year
lump, are not to be compared to one month's work at real war, to fit
an army for its real work, and France knows well the real work will
come again some day--not far off--for her army. How soon it comes
she little cares, for she has no ideal of Peace before her, never
has had, never will have, and the next time she tries conclusions
with one of us Teutonic nations, she will be armed with men who have
learned their trade well on the burning sands of Senegal, and they
will take a lot of beating. We do not require Africa as a training
ground for our army; India is as magnificent a military academy as
any nation requires; but we do require all the Africa we can get,
West, East, and South, for a market, and it is here we clash with
France; for France not only does not develop the trade of her
colonies for her own profit, but stamps trade at large out by her
preferential tariffs, etc.; so that we cannot go into her colonies
and trade freely as she and Germany can come into ours. We can go
into her colonies and do business with French goods, and this is
done; but French goods are not so suitable, from their make, nor
capable of being sold at a sufficient profit to make a big trade.
But France throws few obstacles, if any, in the matter of plantation
enterprise. Still this enterprise being so hampered by the dearth
of good labour is not at the present time highly remunerative in
Africa.
FOREIGN LABOUR.--Several important authorities have advocated the
importation of foreign labour into Africa. This seems to me to be a
fatal error, for several reasons. For one thing, experience has by
now fully demonstrated that the West Coast climate is bad for men
not native to it, whether those men be white, black, or yellow. The
United Presbyterian Mission who work in Old Calabar was founded with
the intention of inaugurating a mission which, after the white men
had established it, was to be carried on by educated Christian
blacks from Jamaica, where this mission had long been established
and flourished. But it was found that these men, although primarily
Africans, had by their deportation from Africa in the course, in
some cases, of only one generation, lost the power of resistance to
the deadly malarial climate their forefathers possessed, and so the
mission is now carried on by whites; not that these good people have
a greater resistance to the fever than the Jamaica Christians, but
because they are more devoted to the evangelisation of the African;
and what black assistance they receive comes, with the exception of
Mrs. Fuller, from a few educated Effiks of Calabar.
The Congo Free State have imported as labourers both West Indian
negroes--principally Barbadians--and Chinamen. In both cases the
mortality has been terrible--more than the white mortality, which
competent authorities put down for the Congo at 77 per cent., and
the experiment has therefore failed. It may be said that much of
this mortality has arisen from the way in which these labourers have
been treated in the Free State, but that this is not entirely the
case is demonstrated by the case of the Annamese in Congo Francais,
who are well treated. These Annamese are the political prisoners
arising from the French occupation of Tong-kin; and the mortality
among one gang of 100 of them who were employed to make the path
through swampy ground from Glass to Libreville--a distance of two
and a half miles--was seventy, and this although the swamp was
nothing particularly bad as swamps go, and was swept by sea-air the
whole way.
Even had the experiment of imported labour been successful for the
time being, I hold it would be a grave error to import labour into
Africa. For this reason, that Africa possesses in herself the most
magnificent mass of labour material in the whole world, and surely
if her children could build up, as they have, the prosperity and
trade of the Americas, she should, under proper guidance and good
management, be able to build up her own. But good guidance and
proper management are the things that are wanted--and are wanting.
It is impossible to go into this complicated question fully here,
and I will merely ask unprejudiced people who do not agree with me,
whether they do not think that as so much has been done with one
African tribe, the Krumen--a tribe possessing no material difference
in make of mind or body from hundreds of other tribes, but which
have merely been trained by white men in a different way from other
tribes--that there is room for great hope in the native labour
supply? And would not a very hopeful outlook for West Africa
regarding the labour question be possible, if a regime of common
sense were substituted for our present one?
This is of course the missionary question--a question which I feel
it is hopeless to attempt to speak of without being gravely
misunderstood, and which I therefore would willingly shirk
mentioning, but I am convinced that the future of Africa is not to
be dissociated from the future of its natives by the importation of
yellow races or Hindoos; and the missionary question is not to be
dissociated from the future of the African natives; and so the
subject must be touched on; and I preface my remarks by stating that
I have a profound personal esteem for several missionaries,
naturally, for it is impossible to know such men and women as Mr.
and Mrs. Dennis Kemp, of the Gold Coast, Mme. and M. Jacot, and Mme.
and M. Forget, and M. Gacon, and Dr. Nassau, of Gaboon, and many
others without recognising at once the beauty of their natures, and
the nobility of their intentions. Indeed, taken as a whole, the
missionaries must be regarded as superbly brave, noble-minded men
who go and risk their own lives, and often those of their wives and
children, and definitely sacrifice their personal comfort and safety
to do what, from their point of view, is their simple duty; but it
is their methods of working that have produced in West Africa the
results which all truly interested in West Africa must deplore; and
one is bound to make an admission that goes against one's insular
prejudice--that the Protestant English missionaries have had most to
do with rendering the African useless.
The bad effects that have arisen from their teaching have come
primarily from the failure of the missionary to recognise the
difference between the African and themselves as being a difference
not of degree but of kind. I am aware that they are supported in
this idea by several eminent ethnologists; but still there are a
large number of anatomical facts that point the other way, and a far
larger number still relating to mental attributes, and I feel
certain that a black man is no more an undeveloped white man than a
rabbit is an undeveloped hare; and the mental difference between the
two races is very similar to that between men and women among
ourselves. A great woman, either mentally or physically, will excel
an indifferent man, but no woman ever equals a really great man.
The missionary to the African has done what my father found them
doing to the Polynesians--"regarding the native minds as so many
jugs only requiring to be emptied of the stuff which is in them and
refilled with the particular form of dogma he is engaged in
teaching, in order to make them the equals of the white races."
This form of procedure works in very various ways. It eliminates
those parts of the native fetish that were a wholesome restraint on
the African. The children in the mission school are, be it granted,
better than the children outside it in some ways; they display great
aptitude for learning anything that comes in their way--but there is
a great difference between white and black children. The black
child is a very solemn thing. It comes into the world in large
quantities and looks upon it with its great sad eyes as if it were
weighing carefully the question whether or no it is a fit place for
a respectable soul to abide in. Four times in ten it decides that
it is not, and dies. If, however, it decides to stay, it passes
between two and three years in a grim and profound study--
occasionally emitting howls which end suddenly in a sob--whine it
never does. At the end of this period it takes to spoon food, walks
about and makes itself handy to its mother or goes into the mission
school. If it remains in the native state it has no toys of a
frivolous nature, a little hoe or a little calabash are considered
better training; if it goes into the school, it picks up, with
astonishing rapidity, the lessons taught it there--giving rise to
hopes for its future which are only too frequently disappointed in a
few years' time. It is not until he reaches years of indiscretion
that the African becomes joyful; but, when he attains this age he
always does cheer up considerably, and then, whatever his previous
training may have been, he takes to what Mr. Kipling calls "boot"
with great avidity--and of this he consumes an enormous quantity.
For the next sixteen years, barring accidents, he "rips"; he rips
carefully, terrified by his many fetish restrictions, if he is a
pagan; but if he is in that partially converted state you usually
find him in when trouble has been taken with his soul--then he rips
unrestrained.
It is most unfair to describe Africans in this state as "converted,"
either in missionary reports or in attacks on them. They are not
converted in the least. A really converted African is a very
beautiful form of Christian; but those Africans who are the chief
mainstay of missionary reports and who afford such material for the
scoffer thereat, have merely had the restraint of fear removed from
their minds in the mission schools without the greater restraint of
love being put in its place.
The missionary-made man is the curse of the Coast, and you find him
in European clothes and without, all the way down from Sierra Leone
to Loanda. The pagans despise him, the whites hate him, still he
thinks enough of himself to keep him comfortable. His conceit is
marvellous, nothing equals it except perhaps that of the individual
rife among us which the Saturday Review once aptly described as "the
suburban agnostic"; and the "missionary man" is very much like the
suburban agnostic in his religious method. After a period of
mission-school life he returns to his country-fashion, and deals
with the fetish connected with it very much in the same way as the
suburban agnostic deals with his religion, i.e. he removes from it
all the inconvenient portions. "Shouldn't wonder if there might be
something in the idea of the immortality of the soul, and a future
Heaven, you know--but as for Hell, my dear sir, that's rank
superstition, no one believes in it now, and as for Sabbath-keeping
and food-restrictions--what utter rubbish for enlightened people!"
So the backsliding African deals with his country-fashion ideas: he
eliminates from them the idea of immediate retribution, etc., and
keeps the polygamy and the dances, and all the lazy, hazy-minded
native ways. The education he has received at the mission school in
reading and writing fits him for a commercial career, and as every
African is a born trader he embarks on it, and there are pretty
goings on! On the West Coast he frequently sets up in business for
himself; on the South-West Coast he usually becomes a sub-trader to
one of the great English, French, or German firms. On both Coasts
he gets himself disliked, and brings down opprobrium on all black
traders, expressed in language more powerful than select. This
wholesale denunciation of black traders is unfair, because there are
many perfectly straight trading natives; still the majority are
recruited from missionary school failures, and are utterly bad.
"Post hoc non propter hoc" is an excellent maxim, but one that never
seems to enter the missionary head down here. Highly disgusted and
pained at his pupils' goings-on, but absolutely convinced of the
excellence of his own methods of instruction, and the spiritual
equality, irrespective of colour, of Christians; the missionary
rises up, and says things one can understand him saying about the
bad influence of the white traders; stating that they lure the
pupils from the fold to destruction. These things are nevertheless
not true. Then the white trader hears them, and gets his back up
and says things about the effect of missionary training on the
African, which are true, but harsh, because it is not the
missionaries' intent to turn out skilful forgers, and unmitigated
liars, although they practically do so. My share when I drop in on
this state of mutual recrimination is to get myself into hot water
with both parties. The missionary thinks me misguided for regarding
the African's goings-on as part of the make of the man, and the
trader regards me as a soft-headed idiot when I state that it is not
the missionary's individual blame that a lamb recently acquired from
the fold has gone down the primrose path with the trust, or the rum.
Shade of Sir John Falstaff! what a life this is!
The two things to which the missionary himself ascribes his want of
success are polygamy and the liquor traffic. Now polygamy is, like
most other subjects, a difficult thing to form a just opinion on, if
before forming the opinion you make a careful study of the facts
bearing on the case. It is therefore advisable, if you wish to
produce an opinion generally acceptable in civilised circles, to
follow the usual recipe for making opinions--just take a prejudice
of your own, and fix it up with the so-called opinion of that class
of people who go in for that sort of prejudice too. I have got
myself so entangled with facts that I cannot follow this plan, and
therefore am compelled to think polygamy for the African is not an
unmixed evil; and that at the present culture-level of the African
it is not to be eradicated. This arises from two reasons; the first
is that it is perfectly impossible for one African woman to do the
work of the house, prepare the food, fetch water, cultivate the
plantations, and look after the children attributive to one man.
She might do it if she had the work in her of an English or Irish
charwoman, but she has not, and a whole villageful of African women
do not do the work in a week that one of these will do in a day.
Then, too, the African lady is quite indifferent as to what extent
her good man may flirt with other ladies so long only as he does not
go and give them more cloth and beads than he gives her; and the
second reason for polygamy lies in the custom well-known to
ethnologists, and so widely diffused that one might say it was
constant throughout all African tribes, only there are so many of
them whose domestic relationships have not been carefully observed.
As regards the drink traffic--no one seems inclined to speak the
truth about it in West Africa; and what I say I must be understood
to say only about West Africa, because I do not like to form
opinions without having had opportunities for personal observation,
and the only part of Africa I have had these opportunities in has
been from Sierra Leone to Angola; and the reports from South Africa
show that an entirely different, and a most unhealthy state of
affairs exists there from its invasion by mixed European
nationalities, with individuals of a low type, greedy for wealth.
West African conditions are no more like South African conditions
than they are like Indian. The missionary party on the whole have
gravely exaggerated both the evil and the extent of the liquor
traffic in West Africa. I make an exception in favour of the late
superintendent of the Wesleyan mission on the Gold Coast, the Rev.
Dennis Kemp, who had enough courage and truth in him to stand up at
a public meeting in Liverpool, on July 2nd, 1896, and record it as
his opinion that, "the natives of the Gold Coast were remarkably
abstemious; but spirits were, 'he believed,' of no benefit to the
natives, and they would be better without them." I have quoted the
whole of the remark, as it is never fair to quote half a man says on
any subject, but I do not agree with the latter half of it, and the
Gold Coast natives are not any more abstemious, if so much so, as
other tribes on the Coast. I have elsewhere {493} attempted to show
that the drink-traffic is by no means the most important factor in
the mission failure on the West Coast, but that it has been used in
an unjustifiable way by the missionary party, because they know the
cry against alcohol is at present a popular one in England, and it
has also the advantage of making the subscribers at home regard the
African as an innocent creature who is led away by bad white men,
and therefore still more interesting and more worthy, and in more
need of subscriptions than ever. I should rather like to see the
African lady or gentleman who could be "led away"--all the leading
away I have seen on the Coast has been the other way about.
I do not say every missionary on the West Coast who makes untrue
statements on this subject is an original liar; he is usually only
following his leaders and repeating their observations without going
into the evidence around him; and the missionary public in England
and Scotland are largely to blame for their perpetual thirst for
thrilling details of the amount of Baptisms and Experiences among
the people they pay other people to risk their lives to convert, or
for thrilling details of the difficulties these said emissaries have
to contend with. As for the general public who swallow the
statements, I think they are prone, from the evidence of the evils
they see round them directly arising from drink, to accept as true--
without bothering themselves with calm investigation--statements of
a like effect regarding other people. I have no hesitation in
saying that in the whole of West Africa, in one week, there is not
one-quarter the amount of drunkenness you can see any Saturday night
you choose in a couple of hours in the Vauxhall Road; and you will
not find in a whole year's investigation on the Coast, one-
seventieth part of the evil, degradation, and premature decay you
can see any afternoon you choose to take a walk in the more densely-
populated parts of any of our own towns. I own the whole affair is
no business of mine; for I have no financial interest in the liquor
traffic whatsoever. But I hate the preying upon emotional sympathy
by misrepresentation, and I grieve to see thousands of pounds wasted
that are bitterly needed by our own cold, starving poor. I do not
regard the money as wasted because it goes to the African, but
because such an immense percentage of it does no good and much harm
to him.
It is customary to refer to the spirit sent out to West Africa as
"poisonous" and as raw alcohol. It is neither. I give an analysis
of a bottle of Van Hoytima's trade-gin, which I obtained to satisfy
my own curiosity on the point.
"ANALYSIS OF SAMPLE OF TRADE-GIN.
"With reference to the bottle of the above I have the honour to
report as follows: -
It contains-- Per cent.
Absolute alcohol . . . . . 39.35
Acidity expressed as acetic acid . 0.0068
Ethers expressed as acetic acid . 0.021
Aldehydes. . . . Present in small quantity.
Furfural . . . . Ditto ditto
Higher alcohols . . Ditto ditto
"The only alcohol that can be estimated quantitatively is Ethyl
Alcohol.
"There is no methyl, and the higher alcohols, as shown by Savalie's
method, only exist in traces. The spirit is flavoured by more than
one essential oil, and apparently oil of juniper is one of these
oils.
"The liquid contains no sugar, and leaves but a small extract. In
my opinion the liquid essentially consists of a pure distilled
spirit flavoured with essential oils.
"Of course no attempt to identify these oils in the quantity sent,
viz., 632 c.c. (one bottle) was made. The ethers are returned as
ethyl acetate, but from fractional distillation amyl acetate was
found to be present.
"I have the honour to be, etc.,
(Signed) "G. H. ROBERTSON.
"Fellow of the Chemical Society,
"Associate of the Institute of Chemistry."
In a subsequent letter Mr. Robertson observed that he had been
"assisted in making the above analysis by an expert in the chemistry
of alcohols, who said that the present sample differed in no
material particulars from, and was neither more nor less deleterious
to health than, gin purchased in different parts of London and
submitted to analysis."
In addition to this analysis I have also one of Messrs. Peters' gin,
equally satisfactory, and as Van Hoytima and Peters are the two
great suppliers of the gin that goes to West Africa, I think the
above is an answer to the "poison" statements, and should be
sufficient evidence against it for all people who are not themselves
absolute teetotalers. Absolute teetotalers are definite-minded
people, and one respects them more than one does those who do not
hold with teetotalism for themselves, but think it a good thing for
other people, and moreover it is of no use arguing with them because
they say all alcohol is poison, and won't appreciate any evidence to
the contrary, so "palaver done set"; but a large majority of those
who attack, or believe in the rectitude of the attack on, the
African liquor traffic are not teetotalers and so should be capable
of forming a just opinion.
My personal knowledge of the district where most of the liquor goes
in--the Oil Rivers--has been gained in Duke Town, Old Calabar. I
have been there four separate times, and last year stayed there
continuously for some months during a period in which if Duke Town
had felt inclined to go on the bust, it certainly could have done
so; for the police and most of the Government officials were away at
Brass in consequence of the Akassa palaver, and those few who were
left behind and the white traders were down with an epidemic of
malarial typhoid. But Duke Town did nothing of the kind. I used to
be down in the heart of the town, at Eyambas market by Prince
Archebongs's house, night after night alone, watching the devil-
makings that were going on there, and the amount of drunkenness I
saw was exceedingly small. I did the same thing at the adjacent
town of Qwa. My knowledge of Bonny, Bell, and Akkwa towns,
Libreville, Lembarene, Kabinda, Boma, Banana, Nkoi, Loanda, etc., is
extensive and peculiar, and I have spent hours in them when the
whole of the missionary and Government people have been safe in
their distant houses; so had the evils of the liquor traffic been
anything like half what it is made out to be I must have come across
it in appalling forms, and I have not.
The figures of the case I will not here quote because they are
easily obtainable from Government reports by any one interested in
the matter. I regard their value as being small unless combined
with a knowledge of the West Coast trade. The liquor goes in at a
few ports on the West Coast, and into the hands of those tribes who
act as middlemen between the white trader and the interior trade-
stuff-producing tribes; and is thereby diffused over an enormous
extent of thickly inhabited country. We English are directly in
touch with none of the interior trade--save in the territory of the
Royal Niger Company, and the Delta tribes with whom we deal in the
Oil Rivers subsist on this trade between the interior and the Coast,
and they prefer to use spirits as a buying medium because they get
the highest percentage of profit from it, and the lowest percentage
of loss by damage when dealing with it. It does not get spoilt by
damp, like tobacco and cloth do; indeed, in addition to the amount
of moisture supplied by their reeking climate, they superadd a large
quantity of river water to the spirit before it leaves their hands,
while with the other articles of trade it is one perpetual grind to
keep them free from moisture and mildew. In their Coast towns there
are immense stores of gin in cases, which they would as soon think
of drinking themselves as we, if we were butchers, would think of
eating up the stock in the shop. A certain percentage of spirit is
consumed in the Delta, and if spirits are wanted anywhere they are
wanted in the Niger Delta region; and about one-eighth part of that
used here is used for fetish-worship, poured out on the ground and
mixed with other things to hang in bottles over fish-traps, and so
on to make residences for guardian spirits who are expected to come
and take up their abode in them. Spirits to the spirits, on the
sweets to the sweet principle is universal in West Africa; and those
photographs you are often shown of dead chiefs' graves with bottles
on them merely demonstrate that the deceased was taking down with
him a little liquor for his own use in the under-world--which he
holds to be possessed of a chilly and damp climate--and a little
over to give a propitiatory peg to one of the ruling authorities
there--or any old friend he may come across in the Elysian fields.
This is possibly a misguided heathen thing of him to do, and it is
generally held in European circles that the under-world such an
individual as he will go to is neither damp, nor chilly. But
granting this, no one can contest but that the world he spends his
life here in is damp, and that the natives of the Niger Delta live
in a saturated forest swamp region that reeks with malaria. Their
damp mud-walled houses frequently flooded, they themselves spend the
greater part of their time dabbling about in the stinking mangrove
swamps, and then, for five months in the year, they are wrapped in
the almost continuous torrential downpour of the West African wet
season, followed in the Delta by the so-called "dry" season, with
its thick morning and evening mists, and the air rarely above dew-
point. Then their food is of poor quality and insufficient
quantity, and in districts near the coast noticeably deficient in
meat of any kind. I think the desire for spirits and tobacco, given
these conditions, is quite reasonable, and that when they are taken
in moderation, as they usually are, they are anything but
deleterious. The African himself has not a shadow of a doubt on the
point, and some form of alcohol he will have. When he cannot get
white man's spirit--min makara, as he calls it in Calabar--he takes
black man's spirit min effik. This is palm wine, and although it
has escaped the abuse heaped on rum and gin, it is worse for the
native than either of the others, for he has to drink a disgusting
quantity of it, because from the palm wine he does not get the
stimulating effect quickly as from gin or rum, and the enormous
quantity consumed at one sitting will distribute its effects over a
week. You can always tell whether a native has had a glass too much
rum, or half a gallon or so too much palm wine; the first he soon
recovers from, while the palm wine keeps him a disgusting nuisance
for days, and the constitutional effects of it are worse, for it
produces a definite type of renal disease which, if it does not cut
short the life of the sufferer in a paroxysm, kills him gradually
with dropsy. There is another native drink which works a bitter woe
on the African in the form of intoxication combined with a brilliant
bilious attack. It is made from honey flavoured with the bark of a
certain tree, and as it is very popular I had better not spread it
further by giving the recipe. The imported gin keeps the African
off these abominations which he has to derange his internal works
with before he gets the stimulus that enables him to resist this
vile climate; particularly will it keep him from his worst
intoxicant lhiamba (Cannabis sativa), a plant which grows wild on
the South-West Coast and on the West for all I know, as well as the
African or bowstring hemp (Sanseviera guiniensis). The plant that
produces the lhiamba is a nettle-like plant growing six to ten feet
high, and the natives collect the tops of the stems, with the seed
on, in little bundles and dry them. It is evidently the seeds which
are regarded by them as being the important part, although they do
not collect these separately; but you hear great rows among them
when buying and selling a little bundle, on the point of the seeds
being shaken out, "Chi! Chi! Chi!" says A., "this is worthless,
there are no seeds." "Ai, Ai," says B., "never were there so many
seeds in a bunch of lhiamba," etc. It is used smoked, like the
ganja of India, not like the preparation bhang, and the way the
Africans in the Congo used it was a very quaint one. They would
hollow out a little hole in the ground, making a little dome over
it; then in went a few hemp-tops; and on to them a few stones made
red hot in a fire. Then the dome was closed up and a reed stuck
through it. Then one man after another would go and draw up into
his lungs as much smoke as he could with one prolonged deep
inspiration; and then go apart and cough in a hard, hacking
distressing way for ten minutes at a time, and then back to the reed
for another pull. In addition to the worry of hearing their coughs,
the lhiamba gives you trouble with the men, for it spoils their
tempers, making them moody and fractious, and prone to quarrel with
each other; and when they get an excessive dose of it their society
is more terrifying than tolerable. I once came across three men who
had got into this state and a fourth man who had not, but was of the
party. They fought with him, and broke his head, and then we
proceeded on our way, one gentleman taking flying leaps at some
places, climbing up trees now and again, and embedding himself in
the bush alongside the path "because of the pools of moving blood on
it." ("If they had not kept moving," he said as he sat where he
fell--"he could have managed it")--the others having grand times
with various creatures, which, judging from their description of
them, I was truly thankful were not there. The men's state of mind,
however, soon cleared; and I must say this was the only time I came
across this lhiamba giving such strong effects; usually the men just
cough with that racking cough that lets you know what they have been
up to, and quarrel for a short time. When, however, a whiff of
lhiamba is taken by them in the morning before starting on a march,
the effect seems to be good, enabling them to get over the ground
easily and to endure a long march without being exhausted. But a
small tot of rum is better for them by far. Many other intoxicants
made from bush are known to and used by the witch doctors.
You may say: --Well! if it is not the polygamy and not the drink
that makes the West African as useless as he now is as a developer,
or a means of developing the country, what is it? In my opinion, it
is the sort of instruction he has received, not that this
instruction is necessarily bad in itself, but bad from being
unsuited to the sort of man to whom it has been given. It has the
tendency to develop his emotionalism, his sloth, and his vanity, and
it has no tendency to develop those parts of his character which are
in a rudimentary state and much want it; thereby throwing the whole
character of the man out of gear.
The great inferiority of the African to the European lies in the
matter of mechanical idea. I own I regard not only the African, but
all coloured races, as inferior--inferior in kind not in degree--to
the white races, although I know it is unscientific to lump all
Africans together and then generalise over them, because the
difference between various tribes is very great. But nevertheless
there are certain constant quantities in their character, let the
tribe be what it may, that enable us to do this for practical
purposes, making merely the distinction between Negroes and Bantu,
and on the subject of this division I may remark that the Negro is
superior to the Bantu. He is both physically and intellectually the
more powerful man, and although he does not christianise well, he
does often civilise well. The native officials cited by Mr. Hodgson
in his letter to the Times of January 4, 1895, as having
satisfactorily carried on all the postal and the governmental
printing work of the Gold Coast Colony, as well as all the
subordinate custom-house officials in the Niger Coast Protectorate--
in fact I may say all of them in the whole of the British
possessions on the West Coast--are educated Negroes. I am aware
that all sea-captains regard this latter class as poisonous
nuisances, but then every properly constituted sea-captain regards
custom-house officials, let their colour be what it may, as
poisonous nuisances anywhere. In addition to these, you will find,
notably in Lagos, excellent pure-blooded Negroes in European
clothes, and with European culture. The best men among these are
lawyers, doctors, and merchants, and I have known many ladies of
Africa who have risen to an equal culture level with their lords.
On the West African seaboard you do not find the Bantu equally
advanced, except among the M'pongwe, and I am persuaded that this
tribe is not pure Bantu but of Negro origin. The educated blacks
that are not M'pongwe on the Bantu coast (from Cameroons to
Benguela), you will find are Negroes, who have gone down there to
make money, but this class of African is the clerk class, and we are
now concerned with the labourer. The African's own way of doing
anything mechanical is the simplest way, not the easiest, certainly
not the quickest: he has all the chuckle-headedness of that
overrated creature the ant, for his head never saves his heels.
Watch a gang of boat-boys getting a surf boat down a sandy beach.
They turn it broadside on to the direction in which they wish it to
go, and then turn it bodily over and over, with structure-straining
bumps to the boat, and any amount of advice and recriminatory
observations to each other. Unless under white direction they will
not make a slip, nor will they put rollers under her. Watch again a
gang of natives trying to get a log of timber down into the river
from the bank, and you will see the same sort of thing--no idea of a
lever, or any thing of that sort--and remember that, unless under
white direction, the African has never made an even fourteenth-rate
piece of cloth or pottery, or a machine, tool, picture, sculpture,
and that he has never even risen to the level of picture-writing. I
am aware of his ingenious devices for transmitting messages, such as
the cowrie shells, strung diversely on strings, in use among the
Yoruba, but even these do not equal the picture-writing of the South
American Indians, nor the picture the Red Indian does on a raw elk
hide; they are far and away inferior to the graphic sporting
sketches left us of mammoth hunts by the prehistoric cave men.
This absence of mechanical aptitude is very interesting, though it
most likely has the very simple underlying reason that the
conditions under which the African has been living have been such as
to make no call for a higher mechanical culture. In his native
state he does not want to get heavy surf-boats into the sea; his own
light dug-out is easily slid down, he does not want to cut down
heavy timber trees, and get them into the river, and so on; but this
state is now getting disturbed by the influx of white enterprise,
and not only disturbed, but destroyed, and so he must alter his ways
or there will be grave trouble; but it is encouraging to remark that
the African is almost as teachable and as willing to learn
handicrafts as he is to assimilate other things, provided his mind
has not been poisoned by fallacious ideas, and the results already
obtained from the Krumen and the Accras are good. The Accras are
not such good workmen as they might be, because they are to a
certain extent spoilt by getting, owing to the dearth of labour,
higher wages and more toleration for indifferent bits of work than
they deserve, or their work is worth; but they have not yet fallen
under that deadly spell worked by so many of the white men on so
many of the black--the idea that it is the correct and proper thing
not to work with your own hands but to get some underling to do all
that sort of thing for you, while you read and write. This false
ideal formed by the native from his empirical observations of some
of the white men around him, has been the cause of great mischief.
He sees the white man is his ruling man, rich, powerful, and
honoured, and so he imitates him, and goes to the mission-school
classes to read and write, and as soon as an African learns to read
and write he turns into a clerk. Now there is no immediate use for
clerks in Africa, certainly no room for further development in this
line of goods. What Africa wants at present, and will want for the
next 200 years at least, are workers, planters, plantation hands,
miners, and seamen; and there are no schools in Africa to teach
these things or the doctrine of the nobility of labour save the
technical mission-schools. Almost every mission on the Coast has
now a technical school just started or having collections made at
home to start one; but in the majority of these crafts such as
bookbinding, printing, tailoring, etc., are being taught which are
not at present wanted. Still any technical school is better than
none, and apart from lay considerations, is of great religious value
to the mission indirectly, for there are many instances in mission
annals of a missionary receiving great encouragement from the
natives when he first starts in a district. At first the converts
flock in, get baptised in batches, go to church, attend school, and
adopt European clothes with an alacrity and enthusiasm that
frequently turns their devoted pastor's head, but after the lapse of
a few months their conduct is enough to break his heart. Dressing
up in European clothes amuses the ladies and some of the young men
for a long time, in some cases permanently, but the older men and
the bolder youths soon get bored, and when an African is bored--and
he easily is so--he goes utterly to the bad. It is in these places
that an industrial mission would be so valuable to the spiritual
cause, for by employing and amusing the largely preponderating lower
faculties of the African's mind, it would give the higher faculties
time to develop. I have frequently been told when advocating
technical instruction, that there are objections against it from
spiritual standpoints, which, as my own views do not enable me to
understand them, I will not enter into. Also several authorities,
not mission authorities alone, state with ethnologists that the
African is incapable of learning, except during the period of
childhood.
Prof A. H. Keane says--"their inherent mental inferiority, almost
more marked than their physical characters, depends on physiological
causes by which the intellectual faculties seem to be arrested
before attaining their normal development"; and further on, "We must
necessarily infer that the development of the negro and white
proceeds on different lines. While with the latter the volume of
the brain grows with the expansion of the brain-pan; in the former
the growth of the brain is on the contrary arrested by the premature
closing of the cranial sutures, and lateral pressure of the frontal
bone." {504} You will frequently meet with the statement that the
negro child is as intelligent, or more so, than the white child, but
that as soon as it passes beyond childhood it makes no further
mental advance. Burton says: "His mental development is arrested,
and thenceforth he grows backwards instead of forwards." Now it is
nervous work contradicting these statements, but with all due
respect to the makers of them I must do so, and I have the comfort
of knowing that many men with a larger personal experience of the
African than these authorities have, agree with me, although at the
same time we utterly disclaim holding the opinion that the African
is a man and a brother. A man he is, but not of the same species;
and his cranial sutures do, I agree, close early; indeed I have seen
them almost obliterated in skulls of men who have died quite young;
but I think most anthropologists are nowadays beginning to see that
the immense value they a few years since set upon skull measurements
and cranial capacity, etc., has been excessive and not to have so
great a bearing on the intelligence as they thought. There has been
an enormous amount of material carefully collected, mainly by
Frenchmen, on craniology, which is exceedingly interesting, but full
of difficulty, and giving very diverse indications. Take the
weights of brain given by Topinard: -
1 Annamite . . . . 1233 grammes
7 African negroes . . 1238 "
8 African negroes . . 1289 "
1 Hottentot . . . . 1417 "
and I think you will see for practical purposes such considerations
as weight of brain, or closure of sutures, etc., are negligible, and
so we need not get paralysed with respect for "physiological
causes." Moreover I may remark that the top-weight, the Hottentot,
was a lady, and that M. Broca weighed one negro's brain which scaled
1,500 grammes, while 105 English and Scotchmen only gave an average
of 1,427.
So I think we may make our minds easy on the safety of sticking to
outside facts, and say that after all it does not much affect the
question of capacity for industrial training in the African if he
does choose to close up the top of his head early, and that the
whole attempt to make out that the African is a child-form, "an
arrested development," is--well, not supported by facts. The very
comparison between white and black children's intelligence to the
disadvantage of the former is all wrong. The white child is not his
inferior; he is not so quick in picking up parlour tricks; but then
where are either of the children at that alongside a French poodle?
What happens to the African from my observations is just what
happens to the European, namely, when he passes out of childhood, he
goes into a period of hobbledehoyhood. During this period, his
skull might just as well be filled inside with wool as covered
outside with it. But after a time, during which he has succeeded in
distracting and discouraging the white men who hoped so much of him
when he was a child, his mind clears up again and goes ahead all
right. It is utter rubbish to say "You cannot teach an adult
African," and that "he grows backwards"; for even without white
interference he gets more and more cunning as the time goes on.
Does any one who knows them feel inclined to tell me that those old
palm-oil chiefs have not learnt a thing or two during their lives?
or that a well-matured bush trader has not? Go down to West Africa
yourself, if you doubt this, and carry on a series of experiments
with them in subjects they know of--trade subjects--try and get the
best of a whole series of matured adults, male or female, and I can
promise you you will return a wiser and a poorer man, but with a
joyful heart regarding the capacity of the African to grow up.
Whether he does this by adding convolutions or piling on his gray
matter we will leave for the present. All that I wish to urge
regarding the African at large is that he has been mismanaged of
late years by the white races. The study of this question is a very
interesting one, but I have no space to enter into it here in
detail. In my opinion--I say my own, I beg you to remark, only when
I am uttering heresy--this mismanagement has been a by-product of
the wave of hysterical emotionalism that has run through white
culture and for which I have an instinctive hatred.
I have briefly pointed out the evil worked by misdirected missionary
effort on the native mind, but it is not the missionary alone that
is doing harm. The Government does nearly as much. Whether it does
this because of the fear of Exeter Hall as representing a big voting
interest, or whether just from the tendency to get everything into
the hands of a Council, or an Office, to be everlastingly nagging
and legislating and inspecting, matters little; the result is bad,
and it fills me with the greatest admiration for my country to see
how in spite of this she keeps the lead. That she will always keep
it I believe, because I believe that it is impossible that this
phase of emotionalism--no, it is not hypocrisy, my French friends,
it is only a sort of fit--will last, and we shall soon be back in
our clear senses again and say to the world, "We do this thing
because we think it is right; because we think it is best for those
we do it to and for ourselves, not because of the wickedness of war,
the brotherhood of man, or any other notion bred of fear."
The way in which the present ideas acting through the Government do
harm in Africa are many. English Government officials have very
little and very poor encouragement given them if they push inland
and attempt to enlarge the sphere of influence, which their
knowledge of local conditions teaches them requires enlarging,
because the authorities at home are afraid other nations will say we
are rapacious landgrabbers. Well, we always have been, and they
will say it anyhow; and where after all is the harm in it? We have
acted in unison with the nations who for good sound reasons of their
own have cut down Portuguese possessions in Africa because we were
afraid of being thought to support a nation who went in for slavery.
I always admire a good move in a game or a brilliant bit of
strategy, and that was a beauty; and on our head now lie the affairs
of the Congo Free State, while France and Germany smile sweetly,
knowing that these affairs will soon be such that they will be able
to step in and divide that territory up between themselves without a
stain on their character--in the interests of humanity--the whole of
that rich region, which by the name of Livingstone, Speke, Grant,
Burton, and Cameron, should now be ours.
Then again in commercial competition our attitude seems to me very
lacking in dignity. We are now just beginning to know it is a
fight, and this commercial war has been going on since 1880--since,
in fact, France and Germany have recovered from their war of 1870.
And if we are to carry on this commercial war with any hope of
success, we must abandon our "Oh! that's not fair; I won't play"
attitude--and above all we must have no more Government restrictions
on our foreign trade. In West Africa governmental restriction
settles, like dew in autumn, on the liquor traffic. It is a case of
give a dog a bad name and hang him. Moreover, raising the import
dues on liquor may bring into the Government a good revenue; but it
is a short-sighted policy--for the liquor is the thing there is the
best market for in West Africa. The natives have no enthusiasm
about cotton-goods, as they seem from some accounts to have in East
Central, and the supply of them they now get, and get cheap and
good, is as much as they require. And if the question of the
abstract morality of introducing clothes, or introducing liquor, to
native races, were fairly gone into, the results would be
interesting--for clothing native races in European clothes works
badly for them and kills them off. Indeed the whole of this
question of trade with the lower races is full of curious and
unexpected points. Speaking at large, the introduction of European
culture--governmental, religious, or mercantile--has a destructive
action on all the lower races; many of them the governmental and
religious sections have stamped right out; but trade has never
stamped a race out when dissociated from the other two, and it
certainly has had no bad effect in tropical Africa. With regard to
the liquor traffic, try and put yourself in the West African's
place. Imagine, for example, that you want a pair of boots. You go
into a shop, prepared to pay for them, but the man who keeps the
shop says, "My good friend, you must not have boots, they are
immoral. You can have a tin of sardines, or a pocket-handkerchief,
they are much better for you." Would you take the sardines or the
pocket-handkerchiefs? more particularly would you feel inclined to
take them instead of your desired boots if you knew there was a shop
in a neighbouring street where boots are to be had? And there is a
neighbouring shop-street to all our West Coast possessions which is
in the hands of either France or Germany.
I do not for a moment deny that the liquor traffic requires
regulation, but it requires more regulation in Europe than it does
in Africa, because Europe is more given to intoxication. In Africa
all that is wanted is that the spirit sent in should be wholesome,
and not sold at a strength over 45 degrees below proof. These
requirements are fairly well fulfilled already on the West Coast,
and I can see no reason for any further restriction or additional
impost. If further restrictions in the sale of it are wanted, it is
not for interior trade where the natives are not given to excess,
but in the larger Coast towns, where there is a body of natives who
are the debris of the disintegrating process of white culture. But
even in those towns like Sierra Leone and Lagos these men are a very
small percentage of the population. {508} If things are even made
no worse for him than they are at present, the English trader may be
trusted to hold the greater part of the trade of West Africa for the
benefit of the English manufacturers; if he is more heavily
hampered, the English trade will die out, the English trader remain,
because he is the best trader with the natives; but it will be small
profit to the English manufacturers because the trader will be
dealing in foreign-made stuff, as he is now in the possessions of
France and Germany. English manufacturers, I may remark, have
succeeded in turning out the cloth goods best suited for the African
markets, but there has of late years been an increase in the
quantity of other goods made by foreigners used in the West Coast
trade. The imports from France and Germany and the United States to
the Gold Coast for 1894 (published 1896) were 217,388 pounds 0s.
1d., the exports 212,320 pounds 1s. 3d.; and the Consular Report
(158) for the Gold Coast says that while the trade with the United
Kingdom has increased from 1,054,336 pounds 17s. 6d. in 1893 to
1,190,532 pounds 1s. 3d in 1894, or roughly 13 per cent., the trade
with foreign countries has increased upwards of 22 per cent.,
namely, from 350,387 pounds 3s. 5d to 429,708 pounds 1s. 4d. In the
Lagos Consular Report (No. 150) similar comparative statistics are
not given, but the increase at that place is probably greater than
on the Gold Coast, as a heavy percentage of the Lagos trade goes
through the hands of two German firms; but this increase in foreign
trade in our colonies seems to be even greater in other parts of
Africa, for in a Foreign Office Report from Mozambique it is stated,
regarding Cape Colony, that "while British imports show an otherwise
satisfactory increase, German trade has more than trebled." {509}
There is a certain school of philanthropists in Europe who say that
it is not advisable to spread white trade in Africa, that the native
is provided by the Bountiful Earth with all that he really requires,
and that therefore he should be allowed to live his simple life, and
not be compelled or urged to work for the white man's gain. I have
a sneaking sympathy with these good people, because I like the
African in his bush state best; and one can understand any truly
human being being horrified at the extinction of native races in the
Polynesian, Melanesian, and American regions. But still their view
is full of error as regards Africa, for one thing I am glad to say
the African does not die off as do those weaker races under white
control, but increases; and herein lies the impossibility of
accepting this plan as within the sphere of practical politics, most
certainly in regard to all districts under white control, for the
Bountiful Earth does not amount to much in Africa with native
methods of agriculture. It sufficed when a percentage of the
population were shipped to America as slaves; now it suffices only
to help to keep the natives in their low state of culture--a state
that is only kept up even to its present level by trade. The
condition of the African native will be a very dreadful one if this
trade is not maintained; indeed, I may say if it is not increased
proportionately to the increase of white Government control--for
this governmental control does many things that are good in
themselves, and glorious on paper. It prevents the export slave
trade; it suppresses human sacrifice; it stops internecine war among
the natives--in short, it does everything save suppress the terrible
infant mortality (why it does not do this I need not discuss) to
increase the native population, without in itself doing anything to
increase the means of supporting this population; nay, it even wants
to decrease these by importing Asiatics to do its work, in making
roads, etc.
It may be said there is no fear of the trade, which keeps the
native, disappearing from the West Coast, but it is well to remember
that the stuff that this trade is dependent on, the stuff brought
into the traders' factory by the native, is mainly--indeed, save for
the South-West Coast coffee and cacao, we may say, entirely--bush
stuff, uncultivated, merely collected and roughly prepared, and it
is so wastefully collected by the native that it cannot last
indefinitely. Take rubber, for example, one of the main exports.
Owing to the wasteful methods employed in its collection it gets
stamped out of districts. The trade in it starts on a bit of coast;
for some years so rich is the supply, that it can be collected
almost at the native's back door, but owing to his cutting down the
vine, he clears it off, and every year he has to go further and
further afield for a load. But his ability to go further than a
certain point is prevented by the savage interior tribes not under
white control; and also on its paying him to go on these long
journeys, for the price at home takes little notice of his
difficulties because of the more carefully collected supply of
rubber sent into the home markets by South America and India;
therefore the native loses, and when he has cleared the districts
reachable by him, the trade is finished there, and he has no longer
the wherewithal to buy those things which in the days of his
prosperity he has acquired a taste for. The Oil Rivers, which send
out the greatest quantity of trade on the West Coast possessions,
subsist entirely on palm oil for it. Were anything to happen to the
oil palms in the way of blight, or were a cheap substitute to be
found for palm oil at home, the population of the Oil Rivers, even
at its present density, would starve. The development of trade is a
necessary condition for the existence of the natives, and the
discovery of products in the forests that will be marketable in
Europe, and the making of plantations whose products will help to
take the place of those he so recklessly now destroys, will give him
a safer future than can any amount of abolitions of domestic
slavery, or institutions of trial by jury, etc. If white control
advances and plantations are not made and trade with the interior is
not expanded, the condition of the West African will be a very
wretched one, far worse than it was before the export slave-trade
was suppressed. In the more healthy districts the population will
increase to a state of congestion and will starve. The Coast
region's malaria will always keep the black, as well as the white,
population thinned down, but if deserted by the trader, and left to
the Government official and the missionary, without any longer the
incentive of trade to make the native exert himself, or the
resulting comforts which assist him in resisting the climate, which
the trade now enables him to procure, the Coast native will sink,
via vice and degradation, to extinction, and most likely have this
process made all the more rapid and unpleasant for him by incursions
of the wild tribes from the congested interior.
I do not cite this as an immediate future for the West African, but
"a little more and how much it is, a little less and how far away."
Remember human beings are under the same rule as other creatures; if
you destroy the things that prey on them, they are liable to
overswarm the food-producing power of their locality. It may be
said this is not the case; look at the Polynesians, the South
American Indians, and so on. You may look at them as much as you
choose, but what you see there will not enable you to judge the
African. The African does not fade away like a flower before the
white man--not in the least. Look at the increase of the native in
the Cape territory; look at what he has stood on the West Coast.
Christopher Columbus visited him before he discovered the American
Indians. Whaling captains, and seamen of all sorts and
nationalities have dropped in on him "frequent and free." He has
absorbed all sorts of doctrine from religious sects; cotton goods,
patent medicines, foreign spirits, and--as the man who draws up the
Lagos Annual Colonial Report poetically observes--twine, whisky,
wine, and woollen goods. Yet the West Coast African is here with us
by the million--playing on his tom-tom, paddling his dug-out canoe,
living in his palm leaf or mud hut, ready and able to stand more
"white man stuff." Save for an occasional habit of going raving or
melancholy mad when educated for the ministry, and dying when he,
and more particularly she, is shut up in the broiling hot,
corrugated-iron school-room with too many clothes on, and too much
headwork to do, he survives in a way which I think you will own is
interesting, and which commands my admiration and respect. But
there is nowadays a new factor in his relationship with the white
races--the factor of domestic control. I do not think the African
will survive this and flourish, if it is to be of the nature that
the present white ideas aim to make it. But, on the other hand, I
do not believe that he will be called upon to try, for under the
present conditions white control will not become very thorough; and
in the event of an European war, governmental attention will be
distracted from West Africa, and the African will then do what he
has done several times before when the white eye has been off him
for a decade or so,--sink back to his old level as he has in Congo
after the Jesuits tidied him up, and as he must have done after his
intercourse with the Phoenicians and Egyptians. The travellers of a
remote future will find him, I think, still with his tom-tom and his
dug-out canoe--just as willing to sell as "big curios" the debris of
our importations to his ancestors at a high price. Exactly how much
he will ask for a Devos patent paraffin oil tin or a Morton's tin, I
cannot imagine, but it will be something stiff--such as he asks
nowadays for the Phoenician "Aggry" beads. There will be then as
there is now, and as there was in the past, individual Africans who
will rise to a high level of culture, but that will be all for a
very long period. To say that the African race will never advance
beyond its present culture-level, is saying too much, in spite of
the mass of evidence supporting this view, but I am certain they
will never advance above it in the line of European culture. The
country he lives in is unfitted for it, and the nature of the man
himself is all against it--the truth is the West Coast mind has got
a great deal too much superstition about it, and too little of
anything else. Our own methods of instruction have not been of any
real help to the African, because what he wants teaching is how to
work. Bishop Ingram would have been able to write a more cheerful
and hopeful book than his Sierra Leone after 100 Years, if the
Sierra Leonians had had a thorough grounding in technical culture,
suited to the requirements of their country, instead of the ruinous
instruction they have been given, at the cost of millions of money,
and hundreds of good, if ill-advised, white men's lives. For it is
possible for a West African native to be made by European culture
into a very good sort of man, not the same sort of man that a white
man is, but a man a white man can shake hands with and associate
with without any loss of self-respect. It is by no means necessary,
however, that the African should have any white culture at all to
become a decent member of society at large. Quite the other way
about, for the percentage of honourable and reliable men among the
bushmen is higher than among the educated men.
I do not believe that the white race will ever drag the black up to
their own particular summit in the mountain range of civilisation.
Both polygamy and slavery {514} are, for divers reasons, essential
to the well-being of Africa--at any rate for those vast regions of
it which are agricultural, and these two institutions will
necessitate the African having a summit to himself. Only--alas! for
the energetic reformer--the African is not keen on mountaineering in
the civilisation range. He prefers remaining down below and being
comfortable. He is not conceited about this; he admires the higher
culture very much, and the people who inconvenience themselves by
going in for it--but do it himself? NO. And if he is dragged up
into the higher regions of a self-abnegatory religion, six times in
ten he falls back damaged, a morally maimed man, into his old swampy
country fashion valley.