OF “THE NEGRO’S PLACE IN NATURE.”
“Vices the most notorious seem to be the portion of this unhappy
race—idleness, treachery, revenge, cruelty, impudence, stealing, lying,
profanity, debauchery, and intemperance, are said to have extinguished
the principles of natural law and to have silenced the reproofs of
conscience. They are strangers to every sentiment of compassion, and are
an awful example of the corruption of man when left to
himself.”—_Encyclopædia Britannica._ Art. “Negro” (1797).
“TO THE FOUNDER OF THE ANTHROPOLOGICAL SOCIETY OF LONDON,
“JAMES HUNT, ESQ., PH.D., F.S.A., ETC., ETC., ETC.
“MY DEAR HUNT,
“I have read with pleasure and profit your able and courageous paper
on the ‘Negro’s Place in Nature.’ It shows the reason why, at the last
meeting of the British Association, you were received with those
encouraging sounds, which suggested a mob of Eve’s tempters rather than
a scientific assembly of her descendants. Truth—especially new
Truth—will ever meet with some such left-handed compliment, which is,
however, the sincerest homage. Those hisses would have sounded in my
ears far sweeter than any cheers. In the case of your able supporter, my
friend Mr. C. Carter Blake, I can only hope that he shared in your
honours.
“Like other students of anthropology, I am truly grateful to you for
having so graphically shown the great gulf, moral and physical,
separating the black from the white races of men, and for having placed
in so striking a light the physiological cause of the difference—namely,
the arrested physical development of the negro. There is hardly a
traveller, however unobservant, who has not remarked the peculiar and
precocious intelligence of the African’s childhood, his ‘turning
stupid,’ as the general phrase is, about the age of puberty, and the
rapid declension of his mental powers in old age—a process reminding us
of the simiad. It is pleasant to see anatomically discovered facts
harmonizing with, and accounting for, the provisionary theories of those
who register merely what they have observed. M. Gratiolet’s Eureka, that
in the occipital or lower breeds of mankind, the sutures of the cranium
close at an earlier age than amongst the frontal races, admirably
explains the phenomenon which has struck the herd of men, however
incurious: it assigns a physical cause for the inferiority of the negro,
whose psychical and mental powers become stationary at an age when, in
nobler races, the perceptive and reflective principles begin to claim
ascendancy.
“In the letter prefixed to your excellent paper, you have called upon me
for my experience of the psychological character of the negro race. My
opinions have been formed mostly by comparing, after ten years of
travel, ‘on and off,’ the Africans with the Western Asiatics, amongst
whom I have lived eight years, for the most part like one of themselves.
This chapter is therefore dedicated to you, with the especial hope that
your paper, which is a credit to English anthropology, may, in course of
time, be expanded into a volume. The subject naturally parts itself into
three: 1. The popular opinion touching the negro in the pre-Abolitionist
times; 2. The general sentiments during that period of violent reaction;
and, 3. The present state of the public mind when it is gradually
settling into a middle and rational course. After being for some years
“paradoxical” in my conviction of the innate and enduring inferiority of
a race which has had so many an opportunity of acquiring civilization,
but which has ever deliberately rejected improvement, I find that the
rising authors are beginning to express opinions far more decided than
mine, and I foresee the futurity of hard compulsory labour which the
negromaniac will have brought upon his African _protégé_. The
philanthropico-criminal movement that began with Howard, has at last
reached, we are told, its limit of exaggeration, and the pendulum begins
slowly to swing back. It is the same with the negro, and as travelling
becomes more common, and the world knows more about him, he will lose
_prestige_ every year. In his case, as with the criminal, though there
is little danger of our relapsing into cruelties of which we read with
shame, yet there is an ill time coming. For sons may avenge the
credulity of their sires, by running into the clear contrary extremes,
and the unnatural ‘man and brother’ of the day may relapse into
‘nigger,’ the ‘savage,’ and the ‘semi-gorilla’ of the morrow. Already
there is a dawn of belief in a specific difference between the races,
which, carried out, leads to strange conclusions. Perhaps—permit me to
observe—our society could do nothing more useful than to determine what
signification the debated word ‘species’ should convey to the English
anthropologist. But the committee appointed to report on the terminology
of that science of which we are the humble students, will probably have
done so before these lines are published.
“The following remarks were written at Agbome long before I had seen
your pamphlet, and but little has been added to the original sketch.
With you I deprecate any political object being attributed to them.
“I do confess it is my nature’s plague
To spy into abuses.”
But this inclination is not indulged, as some unwarrantably believe,
from any ‘spite’ against, ‘antipathy’ to, or ‘instinctive aversion’
from, the negro, whom I regard as both useful and valuable in his proper
Place in Nature; nor have I any wish to ‘scare or outrage’ any ‘class,’
by ‘rabid flying at anything with a natural or artificial black coat.’
These be Irishisms.
“Hoping that your able President-ship will long continue to conduct the
affairs of our young society with the unexampled success of the last two
years, and believing with you that it is destined to accomplish the
great and important objects for which it was established,
“I subscribe myself,
“My dear Hunt,
“Yours very faithfully,
“RICHARD F. BURTON.”
When doctors are differing, and the professionally learned are
disputing, about the existence or non-existence of a great structural
gulf between the black and white races, it behoves the empirical
student, in other words the traveller, to record his experience of, and
to offer his opinion upon, the workings of the African’s mental
machinery. By these means we can obtain an _à posteriori_ evidence of
difference in mental and moral, and consequently in material, status;
and it is only by the comparison of many testimonies that the delicate
essence of truth can be evoked.[160] Before, however, proceeding to the
pith and marrow of the matter a few premisses must be briefly laid down.
Touching the African,[161] it may be observed that there are in England
at least two distinct creeds: 1. That of those who know him; 2. That of
those who do not. This may be predicated of most other moot points: in
the negro’s case, however, the singularity is, that ignorance not
knowledge, sentimentality not sense, sway the practical public
mind.[162] Hence, at every division, non-knowledge has on its side a
majority, and a something inherent in the unthinking looks upon this as
a test of truth, when the contrary is more often the case. For all
things, true, great, and good form an imposing minority.
Of the two types—the ignorant and the non-ignorant—the former is best
exampled by the north of Europe, and pre-eminently so by England.[163]
The southern nations, for instance the Spaniard, without even looking
upon the negro as his equal, and convinced of his own superiority,
endeavours to raise his congener in the scale of creation, and is not
irritated by failure because he is prepared for it.[164] With us the
“platform” selected during a rancorous political and property quarrel is
still held immutably true. These principles are supported by the
actives, the philanthropic few, between whom and Good Sense runs a broad
line of demarcation, and by those personally interested in keeping up
the delusion; and wonderful is the effect of English atmosphere upon
unpopular ideas imported from abroad. The passives are the many
listeners. To this supreme ignorance I must attribute the general
failure of English missionary enterprise in Africa, and to a great
extent the late lamentable occurrences, in which conversion has ended
with “killing no murder.” It is not a little instructive to see the
effect of Africa upon the exceptional philanthropist—as a rule, he so
loves all men, himself included, that he avoids the land as a
pestilence. When visiting the “Dark Continent,” he finds those living
amongst negroes all convinced of the African’s absolute inferiority; he
resists the evil influence as long as his nature permits, and he lapses
usually into the extreme contrary to that with which he commenced. He
begins by treating his blacks as men and brethren, he ends, perhaps,
with cruelty to them; whilst he has secured their contempt by degrading
himself to their level in attempting to raise them to his own.
To the home-bred Englishman, who has no personal experience of the
African, I would oppose the Anglo-American. The Northerner and the
Canadian see, it is true, the negro in that debased state to which his
race is condemned by climate above the Missouri Compromise Line.[165]
Beginning in Pennsylvania, the Abolitionist traded his slaves down
South—not liberated them—because they were not worth their hire. But he
has ever kept those who live under his protection in their proper
position, distinct from himself, in the church as in the omnibus, whilst
none but the extremest sectarians would admit them to the family circle,
or marry daughters to them. On the other hand, the Southerner knows the
African, and is known to him; hence in Africa he manages the negro
better than other white men.[166] As a boy he has a black nurse and
sable foster-brother, and in after years he is connected with the
“chattels” by the tie of a common interest. He laments the existence of
slavery, but he finds himself fast bound to it by the law of self-
preservation. Having wandered through every State of the Anglo-American
Republic, I can safely assert that in none of the richest, namely, the
centres of cotton, tobacco, and sugar, is white labour possible. If this
be true, surely the Abolitionist should qualify himself by six months’
work in Louisiana and the negrophile by a year of “Wandering in West
Africa,” before they venture upon their peculiar statements. “The South”
is between the horns of the dilemma, slavery or ruin, and she
necessarily prefers the former. That emancipated negroes will work
willingly in genial tropical climates, where life is so easily
supported, contradicts all our experience of the race; and after seeing
the black in many parts of Africa, under his own rule, and under that of
foreigners, French and English, Spanish and Portuguese, I am convinced
that the serfs of a Southern plantation would not change lots with their
free brethren.
Returning to public opinion at home touching the negro, we find in its
present transitional state four popular errors, which are amply
sufficient to confuse the whole subject.
The first and the front of offence, is the confusion of the mixed and
the mulatto with the full-blooded negro. By the latter word I understand
the various tribes of intertropical Africa, unmixed with European or
Asiatic blood.[167] In Anglo-America the least African taint makes a man
a “negro.” Messrs. Nott and Gliddon—to whom Dr. Waitz has done scanty
justice—were, methinks, justified in asserting that a few drops of the
purer _ichor_ produce a decided modification in the moral and physical
character of the black. Had the Slave States manumitted and deported
their mulattoes, the present state of things might not have been. In
Southern America, also, the mongrel is the canker of society and of
political life. In England, every frothy spouter of hackneyed phrases,
though he begins by owning to a mixture of race which, whilst
subordinating him to his father in intellect, and not unfrequently, in
_physique_, to his mother,[168] still enables him to distance his
indigenous half-brothers, is hearkened to as a Dingy Daniel come to
judgment—“a logical bomb falling amongst the Pandits”—a standing and a
talking proof that the mulatto’s maternal is equal, if not superior, to
his paternal family. When I see such a mongrel, who everywhere hates
both the purer races from which he sprang, stand up, backed, probably,
by a philanthropic and fighting Quaker, before a learned society, ere
his lips open it is known to me what parrot-talk he will emit. Cicero,
writing to Atticus, deemed the ancient Britons (_with whom the modern
English have little in common_) too stupid for slavery (_decidedly a
compliment according to our ideas_).[169] The white man is not looked
upon as a superior being in Black-land[170] (_the speaker well knowing
that his sole merit at home in Africa is the title of “oibo-dudu,” or
“white-black”_); that there are “full-blooded negroes” who have risen to
distinction (_quoting a few exceptions, who are not full-blooded to
prove the rule_), and that Paul’s Epistle to Philemon (_merely
recommending, on ground of his conversion, the manumission of a
fugitive_) was concerning a “servant” (_of_ δοῦλος, _I need hardly say,
he had never heard_). He will probably “bring down the house” with
something of Cowper’s wishy-washy sentimentality, as,
“Fleecy locks and black complexion,[171]
Cannot alter Nature’s claim;
Skins may differ, but affection
Dwells in white and black the same.[172]”
And the herd at Newcastle—how deep their studies! how extensive their
experience!—will hiss a counter-statement, and go home convinced that
they have been listening to a speech by a highly intellectual negro,
when the oft-repeated cant is doled out from memory by a white man with
a “dash of the tar-brush!”
The second error is the confusion of the negroid, the Semiticized, or
the noble African,[173] with the ignoble pure negro. This is a more
venial blunder than the first, because ethnological knowledge is
requisite to draw the distinction; but its effects are even worse. The
traveller is ever falling into this pit, and the mass of observers is as
yet hardly aware of the distinction. Of the alphabet invented by the Vai
or Vahie—a race cognate with the Mandenga and cognizant of the
Koran—Commander Forbes (Vol. i. p. 200) remarks, “How far we must have
mistaken the African’s constitution!” Mr. Winwood Reade proposes to
apply the term “negro” to the maritime races, and “African” to those of
the interior; but in the central continent there are tribes as purely
negro as on the coast. Others would assume 10° N. lat., and the same
line south of the equator, as the boundaries of the race; in the
interior, however, it crosses both these limits, nor has any frontier
been traced by travellers. As I have said, the fetor is the grand
discrimen; thus we distinguish the Somali Semite and free man from his
slave neighbour, the Kisawahili, and the Asiatic Malagash from the negro
Johanna-man, who will call himself an offset from the noble Arabian
Kuraysh. By not attending to this distinction between nobles and
ignobles, the Moor of Venice has been represented as a “nigger.” When
such men as Touissant l’Ouverture[174] (“The Opener”) are quoted as
“full-blooded blacks,” I must discover, before assenting to that
proposition, what was their descent. They might be of Hausa, or other
Semiticized blood: and this would be confounding Norman with Saxon. The
negroid has taken a long step in the way of progress; for the Arab and
the Negro, as might be expected, combine better than the European and
the black.[175] Al-Islam, by forbidding impure meats and spirituous
liquors,[176] by enjoining ablutions and decent dress, and by
discouraging monogamy and polyandry, has improved the African’s
_physique_, and through it, by inevitable sequence, his _morale_. It is
a cognate and a congenial civilization, not one imported from 1500 miles
of latitude, and sitting grotesquely upon the black mind, as the
accompanying vestments upon the sable body—both being made contemptible
by the contrast of what is and what ought to be. The pure negro does not
exist in septentrional or in Southern Africa. North of the Sahara, men
are more Semitic than Hamitic,[177] and resemble the peoples of Southern
Europe more than they do the typical negro. I have elsewhere given
reasons for suspecting in the great Kafir family a considerable mixture
of Arab, Persian, and other Asiatic blood.
The third fallacy is that Europe, and especially England, were the means
of introducing slavery into, or, at least, of increasing it in Africa,
with a corollary—ever maintained by a missionary interest, crying “Give!
Give! Give!”—that the empire must expiate the _delicta majorum_ by
spending money.[178] It requires the extremest illiterateness to hold
such tenets. Slavery was a rule in the days of Abraham. Ezekiel (xxvii.
13) mentions “trading the persons of men” in the markets of Tyrus; and
of the later classics there is not an author, from Juvenal to (Periplus)
Arrian, who does not allude to it. The more we explore the African
interior, and discover great races beyond the range of the white man,
the more confirmed and complete is the system of serfdom and thraldom.
The true African saying concerning the servile is, “Once a slave for
ever a slave.” And, as has been shown, the races that believe in another
world, will not manumit their bondsmen even there.
The fourth delusion is that the African vends his wife—as does the
_Anglais_ in France—and his family. This is an effect of sensational
oratory rather than of authority: all travellers have carefully
contradicted the assertion. The accurate Bosman (1698) says: “Not a few
in our country fondly imagine that parents here sell their children, men
their wives, and one brother the other; but those who think so deceive
themselves, for this never happens on any other account than that of
necessity or some great crime; but most of the slaves that are offered
to us are prisoners of war, which are sold by the victors as their
booty.” The learned Barbot (book iv. chap. 1) declares that whilst the
Slavonians traded with their progeny, in Africa the sale of children,
wives, and relatives, “if it ever happens, is so seldom that it cannot
be justly charged upon a whole nation as a custom and common practice.”
Commander Forbes (vol. i. p. 146) expressly asserts that “the laws of
Dahomey forbid such an unnatural sale of human beings,” which he seems
to have found on the south-western coast. The few exceptions would be
considered vile by their neighbour tribes, and even they rarely part
with their own blood except in dire distress or famine. I have seen the
same thing done in Sind and in Western India.[179] As it is, the
exported are almost invariably of two kinds—criminals and war captives;
converted into cash when not wanted for the Customs. The absolute
prevention of slave export is a very mitigated benefit—if, indeed, it be
any—to the African slave; and our humanity has often acted, like sparrow
clubs, in strengthening a worse plague. The History informs us that
Agaja the Great, after “breaking” Whydah, slew 400 men. Shortly
afterwards, however, having taken 1800 prisoners from a nation that had
offended him even more, “he contented his priests with 400 of them,
ships being then in the road, when he could turn the remainder to
profit.” And we have this excellent advice: “It is enough to show
through our history that avarice can sheathe the knife even of
superstition, and that her incitements to slaughter, powerful as they
may be, are confined within narrow limits when self-interest waits upon
lenity.”
I now proceed to offer the reader the result of my actual experience of
the negro character. The conviction that others, as competent to judge
as myself, will join issue with me, is an inducement to proceed, in the
hopes that truth may be elicited: whilst the suspicion that my
statements will be far from popular, makes me look forward to the day
when they will be.
The pure negro ranks in the human family below the two great Arab and
Aryan races. In Asia he is prized as a slave for hard work; as a servant
he is coarse-handed, pilfering, shameless, and with much of the
frowardness of a baboon. No one thinks of him as a freeman; and he,
“hereditary bondsman,” never dreams of liberty, because no one suggests
to him the idea.
The unpermanency of the half-breed, and the frequency of sterile
marriages amongst mulattoes, show an approach to specific
difference[180] between the white and black races furthest removed in
climate and civilization.
The negro’s brain, in which Burmeister and other physiologists found the
convolutions less numerous and more massive than in the European, is, to
judge from its action, weak—a very little learning addles it. Even the
Islamized Somal hold those that read and write to be less than men,
because their heads are good for nothing else.
One of the principal negro characteristics is his truly savage want of
veneration for God or man;—hence, the expressions which we should deem
blasphemous in his wild state, and the peculiar tone of his prayer,
commanding rather than supplicating, which distinguishes him in his
semi-civilization.
In the negro the propensities and passions are tolerably well grown, the
perceptives and reflectives are of inferior power, and the sentimental
or moral regions remain almost undeveloped. This is apparently the rule
of savage and barbarous races. His memory is mostly like that of the
Australian—powerless, except in matters touching his self-interest. His
face is an index to his mind. The circumoral region is prodigiously
developed. The lower brow, where the perceptives are placed by
phrenologists, denotes culture; the upper forehead and the vertex of the
cranium are weak, retreating and flattened.
The extremes of climate and the pitiless fecundity of Nature have bound
down the negro to the completely material. In this point he contrasts
greatly with the Hindu, in whom imagination, outrunning intellect,
degenerates into licence, and whose superabundance of reverence
oppresses inquiry.
The negro is still at the rude dawn of faith—fetishism—and he has barely
advanced to idolatry, the effect of deficient constructiveness.[181] He
has never grasped the ideas of a personal Deity, a duty in life, a moral
code, or a shame of lying. He rarely believes in a future state of
rewards and punishments, which, whether true or not, are infallible
indices of human progress.
The negro is, for the most part, a born servile—not a servant.[182] As
has been said, in Dahome and Benin all the subjects are literally the
King’s property. We cannot, therefore, apply to him the Homeric
statement that
“The day
Makes man a slave takes half his worth away.”
The negro will obey a white man more readily than a mulatto, and a
mulatto rather than one of his own colour.[183] He never thinks of
claiming equality with the Aryan race, except when taught. At Whydah the
French missionaries remark that their scholars always translate “white
and black” by “master and slave.” And he readily submits to the iron
hand.
The negro has an instinctive and unreasoning aversion to increasing
population,[184] without which there can be no progress. A veritable
Malthusian, he has a variety of traditions justifying infanticide,
ordeal, and sacrifice, as if, instead of being a polygamist, he were a
polyandrian.
The so-called civilization of the negro is from without; he cannot find
it within, and he has not the latent mental capacities ascribed to him
by the philanthropes. As an adult he is the victim of imitation, the
surest sign of deference; he freely accepts foreign customs, manners,
and costumes, however incongruous.
The negro, as a rule, despises agriculture, so highly venerated by the
Asiatics, Chaldeans, Chinese, Israelites, and Persians, and recognized
since the days of Aristotle as the most important of all the sciences.
If it flourished amongst the Egyptians, Carthaginians, and Abyssinians,
the battle-horses of negromaniacs, these were Semitico-Hamites, the
noble blood of Africa. His highest ambition is to be a petty trader,
whilst his thick skull, broad bones, and cold porous leathery skin,
point him out as a born “hewer of wood and drawer of water.”
The cruelty of the negro is, like that of a schoolboy,[185] the blind
impulse of rage combined with want of sympathy. Thus he thoughtlessly
tortures and slays his prisoners, as the youth of England torment and
kill cats. He fails in the domestication of the lower animals, because
he is deficient in forbearance with them: in a short time his violence
will permanently ruin the temper of a horse; and he will starve to death
the English dog, for which perhaps he has paid a high price.[186]
The negro has never invented an alphabet, a musical scale, or any other
element of knowledge. Music and dancing, his passions, are, as arts,
still in embryo. He cultivates oratory; and so do all barbarians. He is
eternally singing, but he has no idea of poetry.[187] His painting and
statuary are, like his person, ungraceful and grotesque; whilst his art,
like his mind, is arrested by the hand of Nature. His year is a rainy
season; his moons have no names; and of an hour he has not the remotest
conception. His technology consists of weaving, cutting canoes, making
rude weapons, and in some places practising a rough metallurgy.
The negro, in mass, will not improve beyond a certain point, and that
not respectable; he mentally remains a child, and is never capable of a
generalization. Man’s character is everywhere, to some extent, the gift
of climate. The tropics engender but few wants, exercise is more painful
than pleasant, therefore there is little work. Our transition state in
Europe has at least this consolation, that we can look forward to a
permanent improvement in type; to stocking the world with a higher order
of man. But in Africa, before progress can be general, it appears that
the negro must become extinct by being absorbed into the negroid.[188]
The negro is nowhere worse than at home, where he is a curious mixture
of cowardice and ferocity. With the barbarous dread and horror of death,
he delights in the torments and the destruction of others, and with more
than the usual savage timidity, his highest boast is that of
heroism.[189] He is nought but self; he lacks even the rude virtue of
hospitality, and ever, as Commander Forbes has it, he “baits with a
sprat to catch a mackerel.”
The negro, in his wild state, makes his wives work[190]; he will not, or
rather he cannot, labour, except by individual compulsion, as in the
Confederate States; or by necessity, as in the Barbadoes. When so
compelled, he labours well, and he becomes civilized and humanized to
the extent of his small powers. When not compelled, as S’a Leone and
Jamaica prove, he becomes degraded, debauched, and depraved.[191] I
conclude, therefore, with Franklin the philosopher, that the negro is
still, as he has been for the last 4000 years, best when “held to
labour” by better and wiser men than himself.
The removal of the negro from Africa is like sending a boy to school; it
is his only chance of improvement, of learning that there is something
more in life than drumming and dancing, talking and singing, drinking
and killing. After a time, colonists returned to Africa may exert upon
the continent an effect for which we have as yet vainly looked.
These last two items state merely bald facts, whatever be the deductions
from them. They by no means involve recognizing the abstract lawfulness
of slavery, or the right of one human being to possess and to sell
another. It is quite a different question to “defend the employment of
the negroes, as domestic working animals, by higher organized beings
called _men_.” Still less do they affect to justify the horrors of slave
driving, and of slave transporting, together with the permanent injury
to the African continent, which the modern pro-slavery writers that have
of late cropped up slur over or ignore.[192]
It must be remembered, however, that almost all races have had, in
religion and policy, human sacrifice and servitude; that the latter is
the first step taken by human society, and that without it no people,
from the Jews to the Brazilians, has ever risen above mere savagery.
This great principle is not eliminated from the earlier acts of the
social drama, till the hereditary bondsman has acquired power to free
himself. The stage following slavery is the _begar_, _corvée_ or
compulsory labour—and this co-exists with the highest known refinement.
An Act of Parliament in the reign of Queen Elizabeth compelled married
women till thirty and spinsters till forty to do service to the country,
if they had no other visible means of living. We imprison, punish, and
compel to labour our beggars and vagabonds, even if they fail to prove
how they subsist. We force our children to attend schools; and, until
lately, we have flogged youths of fourteen and fifteen who are to the
full as intellectual as the child-man negro; and the son of a king in
England is not, until twenty-one years old, as politically free as the
Anglo-African of S’a Leone. I see no objection to render liberated
labour forcible[193] until the African race is educated for wages, and
such habits are not learned in a day.
Nations are poor judges of one another; each looks upon itself as an
exemplar to the world, and vents its philanthropy by forcing its
infallible system or systems upon its neighbour. How long is it since
popular literature has begun to confess that the British Constitution is
not quite fit for the whole human race, and that the Anglo-Saxon has
much to do at home before he sets out a-colonelling to regenerate
mankind? Not later than 1849, the “inevitable conclusion” went forth
that “African commerce and African civilization must be entrusted
exclusively to men of African birth.[194]”
Africa’s great present want is an organized system of _bonâ-fide_
emigration. Doubtless the experiment which lately has failed, with a
disgrace equalling the coolie-trade from Assam and Cachar in 1861-2, is
full of difficulty. But as time runs on there will be no reason why it
should not succeed, and become one of the national regenerators.
The opinions of Dahome touching slave export are those learned from us
in the seventeenth century, when England fought for the monopoly. They
cannot master the change of sentiments in the nineteenth century, when
the prized privilege is denounced as a sin—a crime,—a _causa belli_,—the
“sum of all villanies.” I am induced to quote in its entirety the
fourteenth chapter of the History, which may enlighten many upon the
true state of things in Dahome.[195] The King, it will be observed,
expresses himself with shrewdness, and even with wisdom; but in these
lands the rulers are mostly a century in advance of their subjects[196]:
nor is there any deficiency of cunning in the words of the present
monarch to Commodore Wilmot (Appendix III). His polite expression, “I
will abolish slave trade, and gladly, but give me another and a better
traffic,” merely means that Dahome will never cease selling her captives
and criminals till she can employ them more profitably. And it must be
owned, that her system of dealing with offenders contrasts favourably in
simplicity and in economy with ours.
The _institution honnie_, however, is one of the causes of Dahoman
decline. This negro race cannot, I have said, render conquests a source
of aggrandisement: they make war to lay waste, capture and destroy, and
the present King prefers two slave hunts to his father’s one per annum.
At Whydah, in 1694, we are told that the price of a good “Kanumo” or
slave was equal to £3 15s. in goods; “Mackrons,” or unmerchantable
articles, not being accepted. The price is now, including the Custom
House fee, £16 16s., and the chattel is not so sound. The annual number
exported from Dahome cannot be higher than 15,000, which represents a
paltry sum of £250,000.
Were it not for the southward progress of Al-Islam, the slow and silent,
but sure advance of the Perfect Cure, the future of negro Africa would
not be bright. The experience of three centuries teaches us, that as a
rule the tropical continent cannot be colonized by Europeans. We have
also learned that hitherto maritime intercourse with its _aqua mortis_
and _bouches à feu_ has done nothing but degenerate the native, and that
until the long day when the Guinea Commanders—of whom bluff old Phillips
wrote, “their words and promises are the last to be depended upon of any
I know use the sea; for they would deceive their fathers in their trade
if they could”—shall become “virtuous,” such will continue to be the
result. The much talked of “reflux of the West upon the East” has yet to
begin doing good: hitherto, as a rule, the semi-civilized negroes, like
the S’a Leone people at Abeokuta, when restored to old influences have
proved themselves worse than the heathenry. They have almost to a man
displayed the blackest and most odious form of ingratitude, that which
does not merely ignore benefits conferred, but which bitterly hates the
benefactor for having conferred them. It is a generation of vipers that
found its way from the Red Grave to Lagos and Undestone.
* * * * *
NOTE.
* * * * *
ADAHOONZOU’S SPEECH.
As a proof that Adahoonzou was not at a loss for arguments to defend the
conduct of himself and his predecessors, when necessary, we shall close
that prince’s history with the heads of a speech made by him upon an
occasion which is about to be taken notice of, and which took up _two
hours_ in the delivery, for the Dahomans _are extremely verbose_.[197]
Governor[198] Abson having taken an opportunity of communicating to
Adahoonzou some of the particulars respecting the slave trade, which had
become the subject of conversation and parliamentary inquiry in this
country; and having carried with him some of the pamphlets for and
against the abolition of that traffic, which he read to him, in
Adahoonzou’s native language, the King listened with great attention,
and though business several times broke in upon the narration, still
requested Mr. Abson, after every interruption to proceed. When the whole
was finished, the King spoke as follows:
“I admire the reasoning of the white men, but with all their sense it
does not appear that they have thoroughly studied the nature of the
blacks, whose disposition differs as much from that of the whites as
their colour. The same great Being formed both; and since it hath seemed
convenient for him to distinguish mankind by opposite complexions, it is
a fair conclusion to presume that there may be as great a disagreement
in the qualities of their minds. There is likewise a remarkable
difference between the countries which we inhabit. You Englishmen, for
instance, as I have been informed, are surrounded by the ocean, and, by
this situation, seem intended to hold communication with the whole
world, which you do by means of your ships; whilst we Dahomans, being
placed on a large continent, and hemmed in amidst a variety of other
people, of the same complexion, but speaking different languages, are
obliged, by sharpness of our swords, to defend ourselves from their
incursions, and punish the depredations they make on us. Such conduct in
them is productive of incessant wars. Your countrymen, therefore, who
allege that we go to war for the purpose of supplying your ships with
slaves, are grossly mistaken. You think you can work a reformation, as
you call it, in the manners of the blacks; but you ought to consider the
disproportion between the magnitude of the two countries, and then you
would soon be convinced of the difficulties that must be surmounted to
change the system of such a vast country as this. We know you are a
brave people, and that you might bring over a great many of the blacks
to your opinions, by the points of your bayonets; but to effect this, a
great many must be put to death, and numerous cruelties must be
committed, which we do not find to have been the practice of the whites;
besides that, this would militate against the very principle which is
professed by those who wish to bring about a reformation.
“In the name of my ancestors and myself, I aver that no Dahoman man ever
embarked in war merely for the sake of procuring wherewithal to purchase
your commodities. I, who have not been long master of this country,
have, without thinking of the market, _killed many thousands_, and I
shall kill many thousands more. When policy or justice requires that men
be put to death, neither silk, nor coral, nor brandy, nor cowries, can
be accepted as substitutes for the blood that ought to be spilt for
example’s sake. Besides, if white men choose to remain at home, and no
longer visit this country for the same purpose that has usually brought
them hither, will black men cease to make war? I answer, by no means.
And if there be no ships to receive their captives, what will become of
them? I answer for you, they will be put to death. Perhaps you may ask,
how will the blacks be furnished with guns and powder? I reply by
another question: Had we not clubs, and bows and arrows before we knew
white men? Did you not see me make Custom for Weebaigah, the third King
of Dahome? and did you not observe, on the day such ceremony was
performing, that I carried a bow in my hand, and a quiver filled with
arrows on my back? These were emblems of the times, when, with such
weapons, that brave ancestor fought and conquered all his neighbours.
God made war for all the world; and every kingdom, large or small, has
practised it more or less, though perhaps in a manner unlike and upon
different principles. Did Weebaigah sell slaves? _No, his prisoners were
all killed to a man!_ What else could he have done with them? Was he to
let them remain in his country, to cut the throats of his subjects? This
would have been wretched policy, indeed, which, had it been adopted, the
Dahoman name would have been long ago extinguished, instead of becoming,
as it is at this day, the terror of surrounding nations. What hurts me
most is, that some of your people have maliciously represented us in
books, which never die, alleging that we sell our wives and children for
the sake of procuring a few kegs of brandy. No, we are shamefully
belied; and I hope you will contradict, from my mouth, the scandalous
stories that have been propagated, and tell posterity that we have been
abused. We do, indeed, sell to the white men a part of our prisoners,
and we have a right so to do. Are not all prisoners at the disposal of
their captors? and are we to blame if we send delinquents to a far
country? I have been told you do the same. If you want no more slaves
from us, why cannot you be ingenuous, and tell the plain truth, saying
that the slaves you have already purchased are sufficient for the
country for which you bought them; or that the artists who used to make
fine things are all dead, without having taught anybody to make more?
But for a parcel of men with long heads to sit down in England, and
frame laws for us, and pretend to dictate how we are to live, of whom
they know nothing—never having been in a black man’s country during the
whole course of their lives—is to me somewhat extraordinary. No doubt
they must have been biassed by the report of some one who has had to do
with us; who, for want of a true knowledge of the treatment of slaves,
found that they died on his hands, and that his money was lost; and
seeing others thrive by the traffic, he, envious of their good luck, has
vilified both black and white traders.
“You have seen me kill many men at the Customs, and you often observed
delinquents at Grigwee, and others of my provinces, tied and sent up to
me—I kill them; but do I ever insist on being paid for them? Some heads
I order to be placed at my door; others to be strewed about the market-
place, that people may stumble on them when they little expect such a
sight. This gives a grandeur to my Customs, far beyond the display of
fine things which I buy. This makes my enemies fear me, and, gives me
such a name in the bush.[199] Besides, if I should neglect this
indispensable duty, would my ancestors suffer me to live? Would they not
trouble me day and night, and say that I sent nobody to serve them; that
I was only solicitous about my own name, and forgetful of my ancestors?
White men are not acquainted with these circumstances; but I now tell
you that you may hear, and know and inform your countrymen why Customs
are made, and will be made, as long as black men continue to possess
their own country. The few that can be spared from this necessary
celebration, we sell to the white men. And happy, no doubt, are such,
when they find themselves on the path for Grigwee, to be disposed of to
the Europeans. ‘We shall still drink water,[200]’ say they to
themselves; ‘white men will not kill us, and we may even avoid
punishment, by serving our new masters with fidelity.’”
“All this, and much more to the same purpose,” adds Mr. Abson, “was said
by the Dahoman monarch, in my presence, however incredible it may appear
in England”; and I can see no reason to doubt it, unless we suppose that
common sense is confined within narrower limits than experience shows it
to be.
[Footnote 160: I was not a little amused by a reviewer of “The Lake
Regions of Central Africa,” in a fifth-rate provincial paper, who, after
thanking me for my facts, resolutely insisted upon supplanting all my
deductions by his own. Writers in the (London) “Times,” and the
“Saturday Review,” enjoy a prescriptive right to “do the thinking” for
their readers; but we are apt to recalcitrate when the critical hand of
a Methodistico-Missionary print arrogates to itself such claim.]
[Footnote 161: Used in the sense of negro, concerning which, more
presently.]
[Footnote 162: The affecting appeal, “Am I not a man and a brother?”
accompanying on the seal of the Anti-Slavery Committee a kneeling negro,
who, properly speaking, should have been on all-fours, has been to
Africa what Pope’s “Lo, the poor Indian!” has been to Anglo-America,—a
power steadily influencing national policy.]
[Footnote 163: The leaders in the “Times” (1859), as quoted by Mr.
M‘Henry (“The Cotton Trade,” pp. 68, 75), ought to bring some knowledge
to a “public”: seemingly they have not.]
[Footnote 164: “The Spaniards and Portuguese treat their slaves in every
respect better than the African slave merchants; and I know, from
personal inquiry, that none of M. de Suza’s slaves would accept their
liberty from choice.” (Mr. Duncan, vol. i. p. 114.)]
[Footnote 165: In N. lat. 36° 30′—a moral tropic, a boundary between
free labour and slave labour, laid down by the hand of Nature herself.]
[Footnote 166: Thus the Northerner as an overseer is notably more
impatient with, and cruel to, the slaves than a Southerner.]
[Footnote 167: In our popular works—treasuries of error—every one born
in Africa is a “negro.” Thus “God’s Image in Ebony” (London: Partridge
and Oakley), offers in two pages (93, 94), as “convincing proofs that
the negro is morally and intellectually as well as physically the equal
of the white man,” the following jumble of instances: Minerva (a negro
princess!), Origen and Athanasius (Alexandrian), Tertullian, Augustine
(Numidian), Alexandrinus and Cyril (Moors), Arius (Cyreniac and Semitic
speaking), Hannibal (a Phœnician), and Terence (a Roman). Messrs. Adams,
Cherson, and Armistead should learn their ethnological alphabet before
quoting these as “negro representatives of science, learning, religion,
war, and poetry.” The Abbé Gregoire’s examples are mostly mulattoes, as
Christophe and Dessalines. The oft-quoted Mr. ex-President Roberts, of
Liberia, is an octoroon.]
[Footnote 168: The older theory was, that in such mules the mother-blood
predominates (Estwick, History of Jamaica). But this is, to say the
least, doubtful.]
[Footnote 169: To my astonishment I have heard this threadbare fallacy
quoted in all simplicity by Mr. Charles Sumner, the Massachusetts
Abolitionist. The Britons’ inaptitude to learn music and other
accomplishments may still be traced to their purest descendants.]
[Footnote 170: In Africa, as in India, the aristocracy of the skin, as
the French deputy tauntingly called it, or the “prejudice of colour,” as
the modern phrase runs, is the outward and visible sign of an inward and
spiritual difference. One of Mr. Pritchard’s few good generalizations
is, that as a rule the darker and dingier the African tribe, the more
degraded is its organization.]
[Footnote 171: The purely melanous complexion is rare in Africa, where,
moreover, it is generally admired. The fetor is more conclusive as a
test than the colour of the skin. There is no exception to the rule of
smell.]
[Footnote 172: Which I deny. Affection, like love, is the fruit of
animalism refined by sentiment. The old travellers knew better than the
poet. “Here paternal affections and filial love hardly exist,” says the
History. So Bosman declares of the Gold Coast: “The mother gives the
infant suck for two or three years; which over, and they able to go, it
is then ‘Turn out, brutes!’” An absorbing egotism is the necessary rule
of savage and barbarous humanity, and society must have made great
progress before a man can think of his neighbour’s interests and live.
Hence the old author asserted of the negroes: “They are insensible to
grief and want, sing till they die, and dance into their graves.” Mr.
Duncan (vol. ii. p. 79) says: “Not even the appearance of affection
exists between husband and wife, or between parents and children. So
little do they care for their offspring, that many offered to sell me
one of their sons or daughters as slaves. They are, to speak the truth,
in point of parental affection, inferior to brutes.” But why multiply
quotations?]
[Footnote 173: Arab, Moorish, Abyssinian, Egyptian, Nubian, and Berber.]
[Footnote 174: His true race seems to be unknown.]
[Footnote 175: The worst melange is perhaps the Anglo-Saxon and the
negro. As in India, the French succeed better; there are a _naïveté_ and
coquetry in the Gallic half-caste which are unknown to our homely and
unattractive “Cheechees.”]
[Footnote 176: Africans, like the lower Asiatics, ever drink to excess:
“A glass or two” is a thing unknown to them. Consequently, rum has done
more harm for them than the slave ship has. As there is a perspective in
crime, making the farthest appear the smallest, so, as the world
progresses, the present acts of honest men, such as selling spirits,
weapons, and ammunition to savages, will be looked upon by their
grandsons as the “sum of all villanies.”]
[Footnote 177: These are poor words for ethnologists, but intelligible.
I use Hamitic for pure African or negro, Semitic for the Arab, and
Japhetic for the Aryan, or Indo-European race.]
[Footnote 178: In 1561 (the date of Sir John Hawkins’ first slave
voyage), England took the first of three commercial steps that raised
her to her present grandeur. A charter was presently granted by Queen
Elizabeth, who became a large shareholder, and the live produce of
Africa threw 500 millions sterling into the national purse. In 1756,
after the success of Clive, the profits of India became the “soil and
crops of England.” In 1800 began that enormous importation of American
cotton (the first few pounds were shipped in 1784), which formed the
third and culminating commercial speculation.—“The Cotton Trade,” by
George M‘Henry. London: Saunders, Otley & Co., 1863.]
[Footnote 179: Not to mention children sold in England as sweeps. So on
December 5, 1701, Alexander Steuart, found guilty at Perth of theft, was
gifted by the Justiciary, instead of being killed, to Sir John Areskin,
of Alva. Cromwell sold 3000 soldiers from Drogheda to the West India
planters, much as the Pasha of Egypt has lately sold a regiment or two
to France.]
[Footnote 180: Mr. Long (History of Jamaica) has testified to the
frequent infecundity, and the limited prolificacy of the male and female
mulatto. Geoffroy and Nott dwelt upon the sterility of mulattoes, whilst
Serres and others have asserted that the children of a white woman by a
negro are rarely viable. Dr. Seemann observed at Panama, and in South
America, that the European and the negro were not unlimitedly
productive—rarely passing the second cross. Buffon defined species to be
a “_succession constante d’individus semblables et qui se
reproduisent_.” Hunter’s criterion is, that the parents should produce
an offspring equally prolific with themselves, whereas hybrids are
incapable of perpetuating the breed. This fertility-test was widely
recognized. Cuvier, followed by Pritchard, defined species to include
separate origin (how proved?) and constant transmission of organic
peculiarities. Judged from this view-point, the negro is a sub-species
or permanent variety of the _genus homo_.]
[Footnote 181: The organ, not the bump.]
[Footnote 182: So in Anglo-America every stranger has remarked that
whilst the negro invariably chooses personal service, the American
Indian, shrinking from it with loathing, affords hardly a single
instance. In Africa, however, he has a good time of it. The author of
“The Niger Expedition” (vol. i. p. 398), justly remarks that “domestic
slavery in the negro’s native land is not more irksome than servitude in
ours”—he might safely have said more. And it must be remembered, as
Mungo Park stated in the last century, that paid service is unknown to
the negro. Indeed, African languages ignore the word.]
[Footnote 183: It is not a little instructive to see the Southern slaves
of Anglo-America, fighting as lustily for slavery as their Northern
brethren are contending for liberty, and the more especially so after
the dreadful pictures of plunder, rape, and murder drawn upon
imagination in Europe, and devoutly expected by the good people of
England, until hard facts have forced open their eyes.]
[Footnote 184: I speak of the people generally, not individually.
Personally, each man desires children, and yet he is of opinion that
propagation injures his tribe or nation.]
[Footnote 185: A sensible French missioner uses the phrase, “_Les noirs,
qui sont à peine aux blancs ce que sont les enfants aux hommes_.”]
[Footnote 186: Amongst the traders of the Bight of Biafra there are, I
am glad to say, few men so base as to sell an English dog to a negro
king or chief; and were a man to do so, he would be loudly blamed by his
fellows.]
[Footnote 187: In Ffon there is a rude kind of assonance, _e.g._:—
So nun ajilá: Agbanji ajodisá.
Take a thing and show it: on the counter ’twill be sold.
Which Commander Forbes (vol. ii. p. 100) writes with a wondrous waste of
“r’s”:
So wae re jar,
Jorgee
Ah jorgee sar.
]
[Footnote 188: Anti-slavery writers claim a concession, that if one
negro has shown a character identical with that of the white man, the
two families must be specifically the same: and they quote a few “living
witnesses,” some of whom are so white as hardly to be distinguished from
the superior race: others, Mandengas, Joloffs and Hausas. But these may
be numbered on a man’s fingers out of many a million, and we must not
found a law upon exceptions. On the other hand, those who hold the
specific difference of the negro, admit of no exceptionary instances. I
believe in the inferior genesis of the negro, and in his incapability of
improvement, individually and _en masse_.]
[Footnote 189: The learned and acute Dr. Pruner Bey asserts: “The negro
has no love for war; he is only driven to it by hunger. War, from
passion or destructiveness is unknown to him.” My personal experience
has ever found destructiveness highly developed in the negro’s
character.]
[Footnote 190: Barbot (book iv. chap. 5) says of Benin: “But the female
sex is there, in a most peculiar way, so brisk, jolly, and withal so
laborious, that they despatch all their work very fast, and with a
seeming pleasure and satisfaction.”]
[Footnote 191: Of the Sierra Leone people at Whydah, now extinct, see
Mr. Duncan (vol. i. p. 139).]
[Footnote 192: I allude more particularly to a pamphlet called “The
Slavery Quarrel, &c.,” by a Poor Peacemaker. London: Robert Hardwicke,
1863. It is a specimen of what is to come.]
[Footnote 193: Even in 1845, Mr. Duncan (vol. i. p. 115) was bold enough
to advocate the “free transportation of slaves from the coast of
Africa.”]
[Footnote 194: “The Negro Trade,” by Sir George Stephen: the offensive
tone of this pamphlet arises from its having been written for a
“Review.” Long before its day, Messrs. Buxton and MacQueen declared that
“it is by African hands and African exertions, chiefly, that the evil
[slave trade] must be destroyed.” I know only one part of the outer West
African coast which is at present perfectly free from the export, and
that is the Bight of Biafra, which certainly was cleared by English
hands and English exertions.]
[Footnote 195: Adahoonzou the Second’s (Sinmenkpen) speech upon hearing
what had passed in England upon the subject of the slave trade. (See
note at the end of this chapter.) The most important part of it is
confirmed by Dr. M‘Leod (p. 65), who states: “The performance of the
annual sacrifice is considered a duty so sacred, that no allurement in
the way of gain—no additional price which the white traders can offer
for slaves—will induce the King to spare even a single victim of the
established number; and he is equally inexorable with respect to the
chiefs of his enemies, who are never, on any account, permitted to live
if they fall into his hands.”]
[Footnote 196: When King Gezo was lectured by Mr. Duncan upon the
cruelty of slave exportation, the latter, to illustrate the barbarity of
separating children from their parents, “pointed out a she-goat with two
kids, and asked him, if one were taken away, whether the young would not
show symptoms of regret as well as the mother. At this he laughed
heartily, but remarked that the he-goat, the father of the kids referred
to, would feel quite indifferent.” Mr. Duncan could not help smiling in
return, when the King touched his forehead with his fingers, saying,
“Englishman wonderful and a good man.” Probably, the royal cynic meant
this compliment much as the “good young man” signifies in the mouth of a
fast young “party.” Mr. Duncan, however, rightly says of Gezo, as
compared with the mob, “The King possesses talent far beyond the
generality of his subjects; in fact, his noble mind seems to have been
formed to govern.”]
[Footnote 197: If Mr. Abson supposes long speeches are confined to
Europe and Africa he is mistaken: the Brazilians were famous for this
species of rhetoric long ago. When they wished to excite their people to
war, their Eldermen, from their hammocks, harangued their auditors on
the virtues and wrongs of their ancestors for six hours
together.—“Purchas Pilgrims,” 1036.]
[Footnote 198: The present Governor of Williams Fort, who has resided
there since 1766, and is well acquainted with the language.]
[Footnote 199: The country expression for the woods.]
[Footnote 200: Meaning “We shall still live.”]