"_Semper novi quid ex Africa_," cried the Roman proconsul, and he voiced
the verdict of forty centuries. Yet there are those who would write
world history and leave out of account this most marvelous of
continents. Particularly today most men assume that Africa is far afield
from the center of our burning social problems and especially from our
problem of world war.
Always Africa is giving us something new or some metempsychosis of a
world-old thing. On its black bosom arose one of the earliest, if not
the earliest, of self-protecting civilizations, which grew so mightily
that it still furnishes superlatives to thinking and speaking men. Out
of its darker and more remote forest fastnesses came, if we may credit
many recent scientists, the first welding of iron, and we know that
agriculture and trade flourished there when Europe was a wilderness.
Nearly every human empire that has arisen in the world, material and
spiritual, has found some of its greatest crises on this continent of
Africa, from Greece to Great Britain. As Mommsen says: "It was through
Africa that Christianity became the religion of the world." In Africa
the last flood of Germanic invasions spent itself within hearing of the
last gasp of Byzantium, and it was through Africa that Islam came to
play its great rôle of conqueror and civilizer.
With the Renaissance and the widened world of modern thought Africa came
no less suddenly with her new-old gift. Shakespeare's "Ancient Pistol"
cries:
A foutre for the world and worldlings base!
I speak of Africa and golden joys!
He echoes a legend of gold from the days of Punt and Ophir to those of
Ghana, the Gold Coast, and the Rand. This thought had sent the world's
greed scurrying down the hot, mysterious coasts of Africa to the Good
Hope of gain, until for the first time a real world-commerce was born,
albeit it started as a commerce mainly in the bodies and souls of men.
The present problem of problems is nothing more than democracy beating
itself helplessly against the color bar,--purling, seeping, seething,
foaming to burst through, ever and again overwhelming the emerging
masses of white men in its rolling backwaters and held back by those who
dream of future kingdoms of greed built on black and brown and yellow
slavery.
The indictment of Africa against Europe is grave. For four hundred years
white Europe was the chief support of that trade in human beings which
first and last robbed black Africa of a hundred million human beings,
transformed the face of her social life, overthrew organized government,
distorted ancient industry, and snuffed out the lights of cultural
development. Today instead of removing laborers from Africa to distant
slavery, industry built on a new slavery approaches Africa to deprive
the natives of their land, to force them to toil, and to reap all the
profit for the white world.
It is scarcely necessary to remind the reader of the essential facts
underlying these broad assertions. A recent law of the Union of South
Africa assigns nearly two hundred and fifty million acres of the best of
natives' land to a million and a half whites and leaves thirty-six
million acres of swamp and marsh for four and a half-million blacks. In
Rhodesia over ninety million acres have been practically confiscated. In
the Belgian Congo all the land was declared the property of the state.
Slavery in all but name has been the foundation of the cocoa industry in
St. Thome and St. Principe and in the mines of the Rand. Gin has been
one of the greatest of European imports, having increased fifty per
cent. in ten years and reaching a total of at least twenty-five million
dollars a year today. Negroes of ability have been carefully gotten rid
of, deposed from authority, kept out of positions of influence, and
discredited in their people's eyes, while a caste of white overseers and
governing officials has appeared everywhere.
Naturally, the picture is not all lurid. David Livingstone has had his
successors and Europe has given Africa something of value in the
beginning of education and industry. Yet the balance of iniquity is
desperately large; but worse than that, it has aroused no world protest.
A great Englishman, familiar with African problems for a generation,
says frankly today: "There does not exist any real international
conscience to which you can appeal."
Moreover, that treatment shows no certain signs of abatement. Today in
England the Empire Resources Development Committee proposes to treat
African colonies as "crown estates" and by intensive scientific
exploitation of both land and labor to make these colonies pay the
English national debt after the war! German thinkers, knowing the
tremendous demand for raw material which would follow the war, had
similar plans of exploitation. "It is the clear, common sense of the
African situation," says H.G. Wells, "that while these precious regions
of raw material remain divided up between a number of competitive
European imperialisms, each resolutely set upon the exploitation of its
'possessions' to its own advantage and the disadvantage of the others,
there can be no permanent peace in the world. It is impossible."
We, then, who fought the war against war; who in a hell of blood and
suffering held hardly our souls in leash by the vision of a world
organized for peace; who are looking for industrial democracy and for
the organization of Europe so as to avoid incentives to war,--we, least
of all, should be willing to leave the backward world as the greatest
temptation, not only to wars based on international jealousies, but to
the most horrible of wars,--which arise from the revolt of the maddened
against those who hold them in common contempt.
Consider, my reader,--if you were today a man of some education and
knowledge, but born a Japanese or a Chinaman, an East Indian or a Negro,
what would you do and think? What would be in the present chaos your
outlook and plan for the future? Manifestly, you would want freedom for
your people,--freedom from insult, from segregation, from poverty, from
physical slavery. If the attitude of the European and American worlds is
in the future going to be based essentially upon the same policies as in
the past, then there is but one thing for the trained man of darker
blood to do and that is definitely and as openly as possible to organize
his world for war against Europe. He may have to do it by secret,
underground propaganda, as in Egypt and India and eventually in the
United States; or by open increase of armament, as in Japan; or by
desperate efforts at modernization, as in China; but he must do it. He
represents the vast majority of mankind. To surrender would be far worse
than physical death. There is no way out unless the white world gives up
such insult as its modern use of the adjective "yellow" indicates, or
its connotation of "chink" and "nigger" implies; either it gives up the
plan of color serfdom which its use of the other adjective "white"
implies, as indicating everything decent and every part of the world
worth living in,--or trouble is written in the stars!
It is, therefore, of singular importance after disquieting delay to see
the real Pacifist appear. Both England and Germany have recently been
basing their claims to parts of black Africa on the wishes and interests
of the black inhabitants. Lloyd George has declared "the general
principle of national self-determination applicable at least to German
Africa," while Chancellor Hertling once welcomed a discussion "on the
reconstruction of the world's colonial possessions."
The demand that an Africa for Africans shall replace the present
barbarous scramble for exploitation by individual states comes from
singularly different sources. Colored America demands that "the
conquered German colonies should not be returned to Germany, neither
should they be held by the Allies. Here is the opportunity for the
establishment of a nation that may never recur. Thousands of colored
men, sick of white arrogance and hypocrisy, see in this their race's
only salvation."
Sir Harry H. Johnston recently said: "If we are to talk, as we do,
sentimentally but justly about restoring the nationhood of Poland, about
giving satisfaction to the separatist feeling in Ireland, and about what
is to be done for European nations who are oppressed, then we can hardly
exclude from this feeling the countries of Africa."
Laborers, black laborers, on the Canal Zone write: "Out of this chaos
may be the great awakening of our race. There is cause for rejoicing. If
we fail to embrace this opportunity now, we fail to see how we will be
ever able to solve the race question. It is for the British Negro, the
French Negro, and the American Negro to rise to the occasion and start a
national campaign, jointly and collectively, with this aim in view."
From British West Africa comes the bitter complaint "that the West
Africans should have the right or opportunity to settle their future for
themselves is a thing which hardly enters the mind of the European
politician. That the Balkan States should be admitted to the Council of
Peace and decide the government under which they are to live is taken as
a matter of course because they are Europeans, but no extra-European is
credited, even by the extremist advocates of human equality, with any
right except to humbly accept the fate which Europe shall decide for
him."
Here, then, is the danger and the demand; and the real Pacifist will
seek to organize, not simply the masses in white nations, guarding
against exploitation and profiteering, but will remember that no
permanent relief can come but by including in this organization the
lowest and the most exploited races in the world. World philanthropy,
like national philanthropy, must come as uplift and prevention and not
merely as alleviation and religious conversion. Reverence for humanity,
as such, must be installed in the world, and Africa should be the
talisman.
Black Africa, including British, French, Belgian, Portuguese, Italian,
and Spanish possessions and the independent states of Abyssinia and
Liberia and leaving out of account Egypt and North Africa, on the one
hand, and South Africa, on the other, has an area of 8,200,000 square
miles and a population well over one hundred millions of black men,
with less than one hundred thousand whites.
Commercial exploitation in Africa has already larger results to show
than most people realize. Annually $200,000,000 worth of goods was
coming out of black Africa before the World War, including a third of
the world's supply of rubber, a quarter of all of the world's cocoa, and
practically all of the world's cloves, gum-arabic, and palm-oil. In
exchange there was being returned to Africa one hundred millions in
cotton cloth, twenty-five millions in iron and steel, and as much in
foods, and probably twenty-five millions in liquors.
Here are the beginnings of a modern industrial system: iron and steel
for permanent investment, bound to yield large dividends; cloth as the
cheapest exchange for invaluable raw material; liquor to tickle the
appetites of the natives and render the alienation of land and the
breakdown of customary law easier; eventually forced and contract labor
under white drivers to increase and systematize the production of raw
materials. These materials are capable of indefinite expansion: cotton
may yet challenge the southern United States, fruits and vegetables,
hides and skins, lumber and dye-stuffs, coffee and tea, grain and
tobacco, and fibers of all sorts can easily follow organized and
systematic toil.
Is it a paradise of industry we thus contemplate? It is much more likely
to be a hell. Under present plans there will be no voice or law or
custom to protect labor, no trades unions, no eight-hour laws, no
factory legislation,--nothing of that great body of legislation built up
in modern days to protect mankind from sinking to the level of beasts of
burden. All the industrial deviltry, which civilization has been driving
to the slums and the backwaters, will have a voiceless continent to
conceal it. If the slave cannot be taken from Africa, slavery can be
taken to Africa.
Who are the folk who live here? They are brown and black, curly and
crisp-haired, short and tall, and longheaded. Out of them in days
without date flowed the beginnings of Egypt; among them rose, later,
centers of culture at Ghana, Melle, and Timbuktu. Kingdoms and empires
flourished in Songhay and Zymbabwe, and art and industry in Yoruba and
Benin. They have fought every human calamity in its most hideous form
and yet today they hold some similar vestiges of a mighty past,--their
work in iron, their weaving and carving, their music and singing, their
tribal government, their town-meeting and marketplace, their desperate
valor in war.
Missionaries and commerce have left some good with all their evil. In
black Africa today there are more than a thousand government schools and
some thirty thousand mission schools, with a more or less regular
attendance of three-quarters of a million school children. In a few
cases training of a higher order is given chiefs' sons and selected
pupils. These beginnings of education are not much for so vast a land
and there is no general standard or set plan of development, but, after
all, the children of Africa are beginning to learn.
In black Africa today only one-seventeenth of the land and a ninth of
the people in Liberia and Abyssinia are approximately independent,
although menaced and policed by European capitalism. Half the land and
the people are in domains under Portugal, France, and Belgium, held with
the avowed idea of exploitation for the benefit of Europe under a system
of caste and color serfdom. Out of this dangerous nadir of development
stretch two paths: one is indicated by the condition of about three per
cent of the people who in Sierra Leone, the Gold Coast, and French
Senegal, are tending toward the path of modern development; the other
path, followed by a fourth of the land and people, has local
self-government and native customs and might evolve, if undisturbed, a
native culture along their own peculiar lines. A tenth of the land,
sparsely settled, is being monopolized and held for whites to make an
African Australia. To these later folk must be added the four and
one-half millions of the South African Union, who by every modern device
are being forced into landless serfdom.
Before the World War tendencies were strongly toward the destruction of
independent Africa, the industrial slavery of the mass of the blacks and
the encouragement of white immigration, where possible, to hold the
blacks in subjection.
Against this idea let us set the conception of a new African World
State, a Black Africa, applying to these peoples the splendid
pronouncements which have of late been so broadly and perhaps carelessly
given the world: recognizing in Africa the declaration of the American
Federation of Labor, that "no people must be forced under sovereignty
under which it does not wish to live"; recognizing in President Wilson's
message to the Russians, the "principle of the undictated development of
all peoples"; recognizing the resolution of the recent conference of the
Aborigines Protection Society of England, "that in any reconstruction of
Africa, which may result from this war, the interests of the native
inhabitants and also their wishes, in so far as those wishes can be
clearly ascertained, should be recognized as among the principal factors
upon which the decision of their destiny should be based." In other
words, recognizing for the first time in the history of the modern world
that black men are human.
It may not be possible to build this state at once. With the victory of
the Entente Allies, the German colonies, with their million of square
miles and one-half million black inhabitants, should form such a
nucleus. It would give Black Africa its physical beginnings. Beginning
with the German colonies two other sets of colonies could be added, for
obvious reasons. Neither Portugal nor Belgium has shown any particular
capacity for governing colonial peoples. Valid excuses may in both cases
be advanced, but it would certainly be fair to Belgium to have her start
her great task of reorganization after the World War with neither the
burden nor the temptation of colonies; and in the same way Portugal has,
in reality, the alternative of either giving up her colonies to an
African State or to some other European State in the near future. These
two sets of colonies would add 1,700,000 square miles and eighteen
million inhabitants. It would not, however, be fair to despoil Germany,
Belgium, and Portugal of their colonies unless, as Count Hertling once
demanded, the whole question of colonies be opened.
How far shall the modern world recognize nations which are not nations,
but combinations of a dominant caste and a suppressed horde of serfs?
Will it not be possible to rebuild a world with compact nations, empires
of self-governing elements, and colonies of backward peoples under
benevolent international control?
The great test would be easy. Does England propose to erect in India and
Nigeria nations brown and black which shall be eventually independent,
self-governing entities, with a full voice in the British Imperial
Government? If not, let these states either have independence at once
or, if unfitted for that, be put under international tutelage and
guardianship. It is possible that France, with her great heart, may
welcome a Black France,--an enlarged Senegal in Africa; but it would
seem that eventually all Africa south of twenty degrees north latitude
and north of the Union of South Africa should be included in a new
African State. Somaliland and Eritrea should be given to Abyssinia, and
then with Liberia we would start with two small, independent African
states and one large state under international control.
Does this sound like an impossible dream? No one could be blamed for so
regarding it before 1914. I, myself, would have agreed with them. But
since the nightmare of 1914-1918, since we have seen the impossible
happen and the unspeakable become so common as to cease to stir us; in a
day when Russia has dethroned her Czar, England has granted the suffrage
to women and is in the act of giving Home Rule to Ireland; when Germany
has adopted parliamentary government; when Jerusalem has been delivered
from the Turks; and the United States has taken control of its
railroads,--is it really so far-fetched to think of an Africa for the
Africans, guided by organized civilization?
No one would expect this new state to be independent and self-governing
from the start. Contrary, however, to present schemes for Africa the
world would expect independence and self-government as the only possible
end of the experiment At first we can conceive of no better way of
governing this state than through that same international control by
which we hope to govern the world for peace. A curious and instructive
parallel has been drawn by Simeon Strunsky: "Just as the common
ownership of the northwest territory helped to weld the colonies into
the United States, so could not joint and benevolent domination of
Africa and of other backward parts of the world be a cornerstone upon
which the future federation of the world could be built?"
From the British Labor Party comes this declaration: "With regard to the
colonies of the several belligerents in tropical Africa, from sea to
sea, the British Labor Movement disclaims all sympathy with the
imperialist idea that these should form the booty of any nation, should
be exploited for the profit of the capitalists, or should be used for
the promotion of the militarists' aims of government. In view of the
fact that it is impracticable here to leave the various peoples
concerned to settle their own destinies it is suggested that the
interests of humanity would be best served by the full and frank
abandonment by all the belligerents of any dreams of an African Empire;
the transfer of the present colonies of the European Powers in tropical
Africa, however, and the limits of this area may be defined to the
proposed Supernational Authority, or League of Nations."
Lloyd George himself has said in regard to the German colonies a word
difficult to restrict merely to them: "I have repeatedly declared that
they are held at the disposal of a conference, whose decision must have
primary regard to the wishes and interests of the native inhabitants of
such colonies. None of those territories is inhabited by Europeans. The
governing considerations, therefore, must be that the inhabitants should
be placed under the control of an administration acceptable to
themselves, one of whose main purposes will be to prevent their
exploitation for the benefit of European capitalists or governments."
The special commission for the government of this African State must,
naturally, be chosen with great care and thought. It must represent, not
simply governments, but civilization, science, commerce, social reform,
religious philanthropy without sectarian propaganda. It must include,
not simply white men, but educated and trained men of Negro blood. The
guiding principles before such a commission should be clearly
understood. In the first place, it ought by this time to be realized by
the labor movement throughout the world that no industrial democracy can
be built on industrial despotism, whether the two systems are in the
same country or in different countries, since the world today so nearly
approaches a common industrial unity. If, therefore, it is impossible in
any single land to uplift permanently skilled labor without also raising
common labor, so, too, there can be no permanent uplift of American or
European labor as long as African laborers are slaves.
Secondly, this building of a new African State does not mean the
segregation in it of all the world's black folk. It is too late in the
history of the world to go back to the idea of absolute racial
segregation. The new African State would not involve any idea of a vast
transplantation of the twenty-seven million Negroids of the western
world, of Africa, or of the gathering there of Negroid Asia. The Negroes
in the United States and the other Americas have earned the right to
fight out their problems where they are, but they could easily furnish
from time to time technical experts, leaders of thought, and
missionaries of culture for their backward brethren in the new Africa.
With these two principles, the practical policies to be followed out in
the government of the new states should involve a thorough and complete
system of modern education, built upon the present government, religion,
and customary laws of the natives. There should be no violent tampering
with the curiously efficient African institutions of local
self-government through the family and the tribe; there should be no
attempt at sudden "conversion" by religious propaganda. Obviously
deleterious customs and unsanitary usages must gradually be abolished,
but the general government, set up from without, must follow the example
of the best colonial administrators and build on recognized, established
foundations rather than from entirely new and theoretical plans.
The real effort to modernize Africa should be through schools rather
than churches. Within ten years, twenty million black children ought to
be in school. Within a generation young Africa should know the essential
outlines of modern culture and groups of bright African students could
be going to the world's great universities. From the beginning the
actual general government should use both colored and white officials
and later natives should be worked in. Taxation and industry could
follow the newer ideals of industrial democracy, avoiding private land
monopoly and poverty, and promoting co-operation in production and the
socialization of income. Difficulties as to capital and revenue would be
far less than many imagine. If a capable English administrator of
British Nigeria could with $1,500 build up a cocoa industry of twenty
million dollars annually, what might not be done in all Africa, without
gin, thieves, and hypocrisy?
Capital could not only be accumulated in Africa, but attracted from the
white world, with one great difference from present usage: no return so
fabulous would be offered that civilized lands would be tempted to
divert to colonial trade and invest materials and labor needed by the
masses at home, but rather would receive the same modest profits as
legitimate home industry offers.
There is no sense in asserting that the ideal of an African State, thus
governed and directed toward independence and self-government, is
impossible of realization. The first great essential is that the
civilized world believe in its possibility. By reason of a crime
(perhaps the greatest crime in human history) the modern world has been
systematically taught to despise colored peoples. Men of education and
decency ask, and ask seriously, if it is really possible to uplift
Africa. Are Negroes human, or, if human, developed far enough to absorb,
even under benevolent tutelage, any appreciable part of modern culture?
Has not the experiment been tried in Haiti and Liberia, and failed?
One cannot ignore the extraordinary fact that a world campaign beginning
with the slave-trade and ending with the refusal to capitalize the word
"Negro," leading through a passionate defense of slavery by attributing
every bestiality to blacks and finally culminating in the evident modern
profit which lies in degrading blacks,--all this has unconsciously
trained millions of honest, modern men into the belief that black folk
are sub-human. This belief is not based on science, else it would be
held as a postulate of the most tentative kind, ready at any time to be
withdrawn in the face of facts; the belief is not based on history, for
it is absolutely contradicted by Egyptian, Greek, Roman, Byzantine, and
Arabian experience; nor is the belief based on any careful survey of the
social development of men of Negro blood to-day in Africa and America.
It is simply passionate, deep-seated heritage, and as such can be moved
by neither argument nor fact. Only faith in humanity will lead the world
to rise above its present color prejudice.
Those who do believe in men, who know what black men have done in human
history, who have taken pains to follow even superficially the story of
the rise of the Negro in Africa, the West Indies, and the Americas of
our day know that our modern contempt of Negroes rests upon no
scientific foundation worth a moment's attention. It is nothing more
than a vicious habit of mind. It could as easily be overthrown as our
belief in war, as our international hatreds, as our old conception of
the status of women, as our fear of educating the masses, and as our
belief in the necessity of poverty. We can, if we will, inaugurate on
the Dark Continent a last great crusade for humanity. With Africa
redeemed Asia would be safe and Europe indeed triumphant.
I have not mentioned North and South Africa, because my eye was centered
on the main mass of the Negro race. Yet it is clear that for the
development of Central Africa, Egypt should be free and independent,
there along the highway to a free and independent India; while Morocco,
Algeria, Tunis, and Tripoli must become a part of Europe, with modern
development and home rule. South Africa, stripped of its black serfs and
their lands, must admit the resident natives and colored folk to its
body politic as equals.
The hands which Ethiopia shall soon stretch out unto God are not mere
hands of helplessness and supplication, but rather are they hands of
pain and promise; hard, gnarled, and muscled for the world's real work;
they are hands of fellowship for the half-submerged masses of a
distempered world; they are hands of helpfulness for an agonized God!
* * * * *
Twenty centuries before Christ a great cloud swept over seas and settled
on Africa, darkening and well-nigh blotting out the culture of the land
of Egypt. For half a thousand years it rested there, until a black
woman, Queen Nefertari, "the most venerated figure in Egyptian history,"
rose to the throne of the Pharaohs and redeemed the world and her
people. Twenty centuries after Christ, Black Africa,--prostrated, raped,
and shamed, lies at the feet of the conquering Philistines of Europe.
Beyond the awful sea a black woman is weeping and waiting, with her sons
on her breast. What shall the end be? The world-old and fearful
things,--war and wealth, murder and luxury? Or shall it be a new
thing,--a new peace and a new democracy of all races,--a great humanity
of equal men? "_Semper novi quid ex Africa_!"
_The Princess of the Hither Isles_
Her soul was beautiful, wherefore she kept it veiled in lightly-laced
humility and fear, out of which peered anxiously and anon the white and
blue and pale-gold of her face,-beautiful as daybreak or as the laughing
of a child. She sat in the Hither Isles, well walled between the This
and Now, upon a low and silver throne, and leaned upon its armposts,
sadly looking upward toward the sun. Now the Hither Isles are flat and
cold and swampy, with drear-drab light and all manner of slimy, creeping
things, and piles of dirt and clouds of flying dust and sordid scraping
and feeding and noise.
She hated them and ever as her hands and busy feet swept back the dust
and slime her soul sat silver-throned, staring toward the great hill to
the westward, which shone so brilliant-golden beneath the sunlight and
above the sea.
The sea moaned and with it moaned the princess' soul, for she was
lonely,--very, very lonely, and full weary of the monotone of life. So
she was glad to see a moving in Yonder Kingdom on the mountainside,
where the sun shone warm, and when the king of Yonder Kingdom, silken in
robe and golden-crowned and warded by his hound, walked down along the
restless waters and sat beside the armpost of her throne, she wondered
why she could not love him and fly with him up the shining mountain's
side, out of the dirt and dust that nested between the This and Now. She
looked at him and tried to be glad, for he was bonny and good to look
upon, this king of Yonder Kingdom,--tall and straight, thin-lipped and
white and tawny. So, again, this last day, she strove to burn life into
his singularly sodden clay,--to put his icy soul aflame wherewith to
warm her own, to set his senses singing. Vacantly he heard her winged
words, staring and curling his long mustaches with vast thoughtfulness.
Then he said:
"We've found more gold in Yonder Kingdom."
"Hell seize your gold!" blurted the princess.
"No,--it's mine," he maintained stolidly.