ancestors emerged from somewhere within the warm zones, we cannot avoid
the difficulty of reconciling that supposition with the theory that
civilisation is in the first instance the result of a stimulating
environment. If on the other hand, we surmise that _homo sapiens_
originated in the colder parts of the world we still have to account for
the fact that his further progress was made not in those parts but in
warmer latitudes where a genial climate afforded no apparent provocation
for continued effort in the way of invention and general development.
It would seem that the innate tendency to conservatism latent in man,
the disposition to leave things as they are and to stick to the familiar
devil rather than fly to unknown gods, is in itself sufficient to
account for those lapses in mass-achievement and those long periods of
stagnation which mark the course of mankind everywhere. We see how Egypt
hovered for centuries on the brink of the discovery of the alphabet but
never attained thereto. The exponents of the so-called "pulsatory
hypothesis" can hardly claim that a change in the climate will explain
the fact seeing that the neighbouring people were able to accomplish
this great feat under very similar climatic conditions. We see how China
developed a wonderful civilisation while the Western world lay steeped
in barbarism, and then went to sleep till now. The size of that great
country made possible always the friction between people coming from
widely separated localities, which we believe to be conducive to
progress, and the climate and general environment seems to have been no
less favourable than in Europe and America. We see how the Arabs made
great conquests and enriched the world with many patient and accurate
observations and then came to a standstill and remained as they are
to-day in serene contentment, strangers to the very idea of progress.
Can it be said that mental capacity and collective will-power were
lacking in any of these people? On the contrary, it is admitted that
they were possessed of mental powers as great as those of the restless
Europeans of to-day who are rushing onward in a ceaseless pursuit of
change, a pursuit made possible only by continuous victory over the
forces of conservatism, and this victory, as I think, is gained not
through the outward circumstances of climate and geographical
surroundings, but through a "divine discontent" which is kindled, we
know not how, in the leaders of the world, regardless of time and place,
as says the poet of one whom he hails as the deliverer of his country:
"A flaming coal
Lit at the stars and sent
To burn the sin of patience from her soul,
The scandal of content."
It is this inward fire rather than any outward pressure that prompts the
captive spirit to break loose from the fetters of the unmoving giant,
custom, the greatest of all tyrants, who grows stronger as he grows
older. The difficulty of reversing the ways and conditions that have
been induced from birth is tremendous, and progress has never been
possible without breaking away, always at great risk to the innovators,
the stoned prophets of all ages, from the powerful grip of hoary and
hallowed custom, which is the essence of conservatism. Initiative
implies the breaking of the commandment which enjoins everyone to honour
his father and mother that he may live long in the land, a sanction
which entails continued adherence to the ancestral ways and ideas, and
which, being rooted in instinctive fear of innovation, has power over us
all.
Progress, then, has everywhere been the result, in the beginning, of
individual initiative in men who were possessed of the power of
personality, the "born" leaders of the world who, whether they figured
as chiefs or kings, witchdoctors or priests, prophets or lawgivers, were
all reformers in their various ways. We see how these restless spirits
have appeared everywhere at irregular intervals, not only in localities
favoured by nature, but often in the most unlikely places, and there is
no reason for thinking that this sporadic cropping up of new leaders
will ever cease.
But although we believe that progress has been started always and
everywhere by the efforts of reformers that have occurred as spontaneous
variations from the dead level of their fellows independent of time and
circumstances, we need not deny the effect of environment, especially
the effect of an inimical environment, upon a new movement after it has
been started, and it may well be that the physical disadvantages of the
great "dark" continent may have made difficult, if not impossible, in
the past that meeting and friction of different cultures which seem to
be essential to the birth of intellectual life, so that here the
admitted isolation of the inhabitants during many centuries may have
served to squelch initiative and foster stagnation. Nevertheless the
influence of environment must not be over-rated for we see that general
contentment with resulting inertia have existed for untold ages in
places where now the sounds and shocks of daily progress reverberate in
a thousand fields of civilised activity without any change being
discernible either in the bodily or mental calibre of the people
themselves, and this must surely teach us that it is not incapacity nor
yet unfavourable physical environment, but that, more than anything
else, it is the dead weight of human conservatism that holds down a
nation or a race to its particular level; that it is the human element
in the general milieu that determines human development, a lesson that
has been well summed up in the Chinese aphorism "A man is more like the
age he lives in than he is like his father and mother."
Some years ago a theory was advanced which assumed the presence from the
beginning of an inherently superior race of blond Europeans who, it was
supposed, left their lairs in the North from time to time to harass and
conquer essentially inferior people in the South whom they innervated
through intermarriage with their superior mentality, and thereby
succeeded in rearing those mighty civilisations that waned and fell when
the "blue" blood of the invaders became absorbed and lost in the old
autochthonous streams. Apart from the lack of cogent evidence this
theory, if it may be so called, is unsatisfactory in that it does not
explain why these putative super-men failed to establish within their
own stimulating environment any of those great cultures that were set up
in places and under climatic conditions which are supposed to have been
far less provocative to progress. To-day the theories of Gobineau and
Houston Chamberlain who both held up the Teutons as being at all times
the greatest and noblest of human kind, do not impress the non-Teuton
part of the world, nor do the later apostles of the more recent "Nordic"
race faith, like Madison Grant, and others of his school, succeed in
persuading thinking men and women that the Scandinavians and the English
are the only people that ever could initiate and sustain great
civilisations. The fact that great civilisations have been built up and
are now being developed by people who were and are neither blond nor
Nordic makes it impossible to believe these pretensions to exclusive
racial genius and merit. "All the talk," says Professor Flinders Petrie,
"about Nordic supremacy is vanity when we look at the facts in Europe.
Dark Iberians and Picts, Asiatics, Gaels and Celts, are the basis of our
peoples. Further, it is in the time of stress and difficulty that the
older stocks come again to the top. The majority of the men of power
among the Allies have not been fair Nordics but dark men of the
underlying races."[19]
Recent study has indeed dissipated that fascinating idyl about the old
race of tall, blond Aryans as the originators of our present
civilisation, for it has been shown that the so-called Aryan
civilisation was inferior in many ways to the primitive culture of
neolithic times, and it can now hardly be doubted that our classical
civilisation is of Mediterranean origin though Aryanised in speech. It
is now generally accepted that history points not to Scandinavia and
Germany, but to the lands lying round the Mediterranean Sea as
furnishing the matrix out of which civilisation has sprung. It is to the
South rather than to the North, to the early people of Egypt, Palestine,
Greece and Rome, and not to the primitive inhabitants of Scandinavia and
Germany, that we must look for those great men whose intellect and
character were strong enough to overcome the natural conservatism of
their times. The mind of the early white men of the North never soared
higher than a valhalla peopled with puerile deities and blood-stained
warriors whereas the swarthy thinkers of the South discovered the unseen
God, invented art and philosophy and developed law and government. And
though the Church proclaims the highest of all born leaders, Christ
himself, to be the very son of God, yet was he a native of Palestine and
not a fair-haired, blue-eyed Teuton as represented by mediæval painters
of Germany and Holland.
It is no doubt true that the invaders and the immigrants have often
achieved more in their new surroundings than in their homelands, as the
Moors in Spain and the Irish in America, but it must not be forgotten
that the civilisation which the new-comers have enriched by virtue of
their new found freedom from home conservatism has not been of their
making; they may have added thereto but they did not beget it; the
spade-work, which is the hardest part, had been done before they
arrived.
Looking, round the world to-day we see clearly that race is not the
determining factor in contemporary progress. In Japan we see a people,
admittedly not white, who until yesterday were stagnating under a system
of childish feudalism, now developing at a great pace a culture similar
with and not inferior to that of modern Europe, while in Western Ireland
we see white people living in a state of sloth and squalor below that of
many "raw" Bantu tribes in South Africa. These facts show that any race,
white black, or yellow, may be kept down simply by the forces of
conservatism, chief among which is priestcraft operating through
prejudice and superstition in the name of religion. To say this is not
to cavil at the priests of any particular time or creed. We must have
priests as well as prophets. The prophet of a new faith begins his
mission by breaking the images of the priests before him and is
succeeded by his own priests who set up new images and dogmas wherewith
to conserve the new-found creed until it in turn becomes too old when,
in the never-ceasing course of evolution, the law of variation bids a
new prophet arise. The priest must needs be to preserve the world from
the anarchy of too many reformers, but his power, if long continued,
tends to inhibit the divine spirit of discontent which makes for human
advancement. It is the priest's duty to preserve the old and to hinder
the new, and when he finds he can no longer ignore the new inventions
that are made around him he will at most accept the new learning as a
means only to preserve the old order whose servant he is. The founder of
the Society of Jesus enjoined his followers: "Let us all think in the
same way, let us all speak in the same manner, if possible," and it is
reported of him that he said that were he to live five hundred years he
would always repeat "no novelties in theology, in philosophy or logic,
not even in grammar." In Africa priestcraft, in its primitive form of
witchcraft, has continued for unnumbered ages to perpetuate the
elementary creed of ancestor worship whose chief article is that the
ways of the fathers must remain the ways of the children, and that to
depart from the old and established order is sinful and wicked, and
under this baneful authority progress has been impossible.
But although the heavy conservatism enforced by this primitive cult has
smothered initiative during many centuries it does not follow that the
mind and character of the African people have been impaired thereby
beyond the life of each generation. The mental sloth in which the
Western world lay steeped during the dark ages before the Reformation
did not become a heritable defect. But apart from the question of the
possibility of the transmission of acquired characters we have the fact
that within the scope of his daily life the conservative and uncivilised
African has to face and solve as many difficult problems as the
civilised European in his different surroundings. That these problems
are made up of elements differing from those that constitute the
problems of the civilised man in his daily avocation proves only a
difference of content, not of difficulty. The mental strain involved in
leading the so-called simple life of the so-called savage is, on the
whole, no less intense than that suffered by the civilised man in
maintaining his civilised existence. In the all-surrounding air of
superstition and mutual suspicion in which the African moves and has his
being he requires cunning to circumvent the cunning of his fellows,--and
very deep cunning it sometimes is,--so deep, indeed, that the
intellectual European has difficulty in following the dark and devious
ways thereof. Vigilance and resourcefulness, careful observation,
prudence, forethought, caution, judicious apprizement of character and
intelligent calculation of probabilities are required for the planning
of the primitive African's daily campaign against the forces of darkness
with which he is surrounded, and to carry out these plans he must have
courage, firmness of will and self-control in no less measure than the
average European city-dweller. To avoid the ever-present chance of being
found guilty of witchcraft, which in the past meant always death, the
African has had to develop the faculty of lying to a high point of
efficiency, and no one who knows him will contend that he is inferior to
the European in this respect. The natural education of the Natives
include the art of lying as the education of Spartan boys included the
practice of larceny. Lying, we know, develops the memory, for a good
memory is essential to successful lying. Some of the ruses and
stratagems thought out by Natives fleeing from the king's wrath or the
witch doctor's doom, of which I have heard from the Natives themselves,
have seemed to me to be in subtilty of design and in daring of execution
as admirable as any that may be found in contemporary detective fiction,
while the fortitude with which defeat and death has been accepted by
some of the unfortunate fugitives would evoke admiration in the least
impressionable of men. I say therefore that those who deny to the
Africans the capacity for sustained collective and purposive effort of
mind and body because these qualities have so far not been shown by them
in the building up of a civilisation of their own must consider the fact
that the nations which to-day lead the world in all the ways of
civilisation remained for thousands of years without leaders and without
achievement while the people who now lag behind produced those mighty
men that led and paved the way to the great civilisations of the past,
and I think that we must recognise in that fact a lesson to teach us
that present inferiority is no proof of permanent inability, wherefore
it may well be that the Natives of Africa will some day rise and compete
with their present overlords in the mastery of all the arts and crafts
of a modern state.
"But," says the white South African, voicing the general opinion, "this
is all very well; the Native may have the brains, but he does not, even
now when he has the chance of proving himself, show the same capacity
for strenuous and continued effort that the white man has shown. He
cannot stand alone; if left to himself he will sink back rapidly into
savagery."
That the South African Natives are still in a stage where they cannot
stand alone, so that if left entirely to their own devices they would
lapse back into barbarism, is not, I agree, open to doubt. But would not
the same fate overtake any nation or community, regardless of race, if
it were completely cut off from all outside help and influence. The
civilised Romans who conquered Britain in the early Christian era, no
doubt, looked upon the primitive Britons as a feeble folk when compared
with themselves, but the erstwhile slaves have since demonstrated their
capacity for developing a civilisation utterly beyond the imagination of
their foreign masters. Rome was not built in a day. The rearing of
Western civilisation required many centuries, and it can hardly be
doubted that if the early builders of the great cultures had been left
in isolation instead of being stimulated continually from without
through foreign learning and influence neither Ancient Rome nor Modern
Europe would have come into being. Isolation has always and everywhere
been followed by stagnation and regression and there is no reason for
expecting the Natives of South Africa to furnish an exception to the
universal rule.
That the average Native is lazy no one who knows him will deny. He is
certainly no less lazy than the average European work-man who must be
compelled by economic pressure to do hard labour. The rough and menial
work of the world has always been done through some sort of compulsion,
either slavery or some kind of economic coaction, for it is not in human
nature, white or black, to work hard at uncongenial tasks unless
superior force in some shape or other supplies the driving power. The
manual workers of Europe are forced by the economic conditions under
which they live to do the heavy and rough work that has to be
done--there are very few, even among white men, who like rough work for
its own sake--and when we consider how small are the wants of the
average South African Native we are often surprised that he works as
hard as he does. The common expression "As lazy as a kaffir" is
counterbalanced by the equally common saying used about a white man who
works hard at anything "He works like a nigger," which suggests that
there is not much difference between the two races in this respect.
Nevertheless the mental attitude of the average Native undoubtedly
enables him to enjoy laziness more than the average European whose early
habits have been formed by different influences. Primitive man is a lazy
man whatever race he may belong to, and civilisation, which has often
been helped on by direct slavery, is indeed itself a system of slavery,
under which the toilers are driven to their tasks by the goad of
necessity. The fact that many Native youths frequently leave their
studies before completing the prescribed course, with the entry "Left
school tired" against their names, is often cited as showing that the
capacity of the Native for sustained mental effort is not as great as
that of the average European, but here, again, it must be remembered
that the general conditions and home influences under which the bulk of
European boys grow up tend to keep them at their studies whereas the
Native school boy is not fortified by similar support. The dread of
becoming an "unemployable" through lack of education, which is a
forcible spur to effort in both parents and children among the whites,
is not felt by the Natives who can always find work to do at wages that
will satisfy their ordinary wants, and, moreover, the Native's chance of
gaining profit and preferment through being well educated are still few
in South Africa, so that where there is neither penalty for failure nor
reward for success we cannot expect more effort than we find. When
education becomes as general in South Africa as it is among the people
of Europe then it will be possible to institute fair comparisons.
Education is the discoverer of ability and without the opportunity it
gives genius will languish and die unknown, as said that acute observer
of human nature, Machiavelli, in speaking about the leaders of
antiquity, "Without opportunity their powers of mind would have been
extinguished and without those powers the opportunity would have come in
vain."[20]
Assuming that the capacity for acquiring Western education and
civilisation is no greater in the American Negroes than in the Bantu we
may note the opinion of a recent student of the race question in
America, as being in point here. In his book "Children of the Slaves,"
Mr. Stephen Graham says "The fact is, Negrodom has to a great extent
qualified to vote. Half the population is sunk in economic bondage and
illiteracy, but the other half has more than average capacity for
citizenship."[21]
The opinion so often expressed in South Africa that "Education is a kind
of thing that doesn't agree with the Nigger" is born of the same feeling
that animated the power-holding minorities against the illiterate
majorities in Europe not many years ago, and, in justice to the
minorities, it must be conceded that the effect of education upon the
masses has always been disturbing and often disastrous.
Speaking now from my own experience I can say that I have found no
ill-effects from education in Natives; on the contrary, I have found, as
a rule, that the Native who has had an ordinary school education is
generally more amenable to precept and admonition than the raw kaffir
though less bovinely submissive and therefore more resentful of
indignities offered to him. The fact that the educated kaffir comes more
often in the way of committing theft and dishonesty than his illiterate
brother is in itself sufficient to account for the not unduly large
number of theftuous crimes with which he is credited as a class; but on
the other hand, the propensity in the primitive male that leads to
sexual assaults upon women is undoubtedly checked and lessened by
education and school-discipline. Education will bring out and give scope
to all that is good and all that is bad in the Native as it has done
with the white man. If the Natives have not sunk to those depths of
infamy which are disclosed daily in the criminal courts of Europe and
America it is not because of want of the usual percentage of criminally
disposed people among them but because of want of education and
opportunity. Commercial immorality and developed swindling are
impossible without a commerce, but the cupidity that begets these forms
of vice is not lacking amongst the Natives and waits only for the
opportunities which developed commerce affords. The potential capacity
for criminality and immorality is indeed no less among the Natives than
among Europeans. Theft, arson, murder and rape are the most common forms
of crime committed by the Natives to-day because the opportunities for
perpetrating systematic fraud are as yet few among them. Unnatural
immorality is common enough in the kraals and in the "compounds," for
the Natives have their "perverts" as well as the whites. At the Native
"beer-drinks" crapulous lewdness is as common as it is in the bucolic
orgies of European peasantry. There is no "Native" innocence nor is
there any "Native" vice, the virtue and the vice, the capacity and the
character of the Native are the human qualities and failings that are
common to mankind.
The Native is no more able to withstand the enervating effects of
isolation than the European, he is no more anxious to work hard for
small wages, no more and no less capable of honesty and thrift, no more
and no less endowed with human virtue, no more and no less cursed with
the vices of the world, no more human and no less divine than is his
master, the white man.
When Machiavelli asserts in general of men that "they are ungrateful,
fickle, false, cowards, covetous, and as long as you succeed they are
yours entirely; they will offer you their blood, property, life and
children--when the need is far distant; but when it approaches they turn
against you." He thought, no doubt, of white men only, but to me his
appreciation of the baser side of human nature seems no less applicable
to the black people of South Africa, and when, on the other hand,
Shakespeare declaims:
"What a piece of work is man! How noble in reason! How infinite in
faculty!"