Up to this time, save for a few Masai at the very beginning of our trip,
we had seen no natives at all. Only lately, the night of the lion dance,
one of the Wanderobo-the forest hunters-had drifted in to tell us of
buffalo and to get some meat. He was a simple soul, small and capable,
of a beautiful red-brown, with his hair done up in a tight, short queue.
He wore three skewers about six inches long thrust through each of his
ears, three strings of blue beads on his neck, a bracelet tight around
his upper arm, a bangle around his ankle, a pair of rawhide sandals, and
about a half yard of cotton cloth which he hung from one shoulder.
As weapons he carried a round-headed, heavy club, or runga, and a
long-bladed spear. He led us to buffalo, accepted a thirty-three cent
blanket, and made fire with two sticks in about thirty seconds. The only
other evidences of human life we had come across were a few beehives
suspended in the trees. These were logs, bored hollow and stopped at
either end. Some of them were very quaintly carved. They hung in the
trees like strange fruits.
Now, however, after leaving the Isiola, we were to quit the game country
and for days travel among the swarming millions of the jungle.
A few preliminary and entirely random observations may be permitted me
by way of clearing the ground for a conception of these people. These
observations do not pretend to be ethnological, nor even common logical.
The first thing for an American to realize is that our own negro
population came mainly from the West Coast, and differed utterly from
these peoples of the highlands in the East. Therefore one must first of
all get rid of the mental image of our own negro “dressed up” in savage
garb. Many of these tribes are not negro at all-the Somalis, the Nandi,
and the Masai, for example-while others belong to the negroid and
Nilotic races. Their colour is general cast more on the red-bronze than
the black, though the Kavirondos and some others are black enough. The
texture of their skin is very satiny and wonderful. This perfection is
probably due to the constant anointing of the body with oils of various
sorts. As a usual thing they are a fine lot physically. The southern
Masai will average between six and seven feet in height, and are almost
invariably well built. Of most tribes the physical development is
remarkably strong and graceful; and a great many of the women will
display a rounded, firm, high-breasted physique in marked contrast to
the blacks of the lowlands. Of the different tribes possibly the Kikuyus
are apt to count the most weakly and spindly examples: though some of
these people, perhaps a majority, are well made.
Furthermore, the native differentiates himself still further in
impression from our negro in his carriage and the mental attitude that
lies behind it. Our people are trying to pattern themselves on white
men, and succeed in giving a more or less shambling imitation thereof.
The native has standards, ideas, and ideals that perfectly satisfy him,
and that antedated the white man's coming by thousands of years. The
consciousness of this reflects itself in his outward bearing. He does
not shuffle; he is not either obsequious or impudent. Even when he
acknowledges the white man's divinity and pays it appropriate respect,
he does not lose the poise of his own well-worked-out attitude toward
life and toward himself.
We are fond of calling these people primitive. In the world's standard
of measurement they are primitive, very primitive indeed. But ordinarily
by that term, we mean also undeveloped, embryonic. In that sense we are
wrong. Instead of being at the very dawn of human development, these
people are at the end-as far as they themselves are concerned. The
original racial impulse that started them down the years toward
development has fulfilled its duty and spent its force. They have worked
out all their problems, established all their customs, arranged the
world and its phenomena in a philosophy to their complete satisfaction.
They have lived, ethnologists tell us, for thousands, perhaps hundreds
of thousands of years, just as we find them to-day. From our standpoint
that is in a hopeless intellectual darkness, for they know absolutely
nothing of the most elementary subjects of knowledge. From their
standpoint, however, they have reached the highest DESIRABLE pinnacle
of human development. Nothing remains to be changed. Their customs,
religions, and duties have been worked out and immutably established
long ago; and nobody dreams of questioning either their wisdom or their
imperative necessity. They are the conservatives of the world.
Nor must we conclude-looking at them with the eyes of our own
civilization-that the savage is, from his standpoint, lazy and idle.
His life is laid out more rigidly than ours will be for a great many
thousands of years. From childhood to old age he performs his every act
in accord with prohibitions and requirements. He must remember them all;
for ignorance does not divert consequences. He must observe them all; in
pain of terrible punishments. For example, never may he cultivate on
the site of a grave; and the plants that spring up from it must never
be cut.* He must make certain complicated offerings before venturing to
harvest a crop. On crossing the first stream of a journey he must touch
his lips with the end of his wetted bow, wade across, drop a stone on
the far side, and then drink. If he cuts his nails, he must throw the
parings into a thicket. If he drink from a stream, and also cross it,
he must eject a mouthful of water back into the stream. He must be
particularly careful not to look his mother-in-law in the face. Hundreds
of omens by the manner of their happening may modify actions, as, on
what side of the road a woodpecker calls, or in which direction a hyena
or jackal crosses the path, how the ground hornbill flies or alights,
and the like. He must notice these things, and change his plans
according to their occurrence. If he does not notice them, they exercise
their influence just the same. This does not encourage a distrait
mental attitude. Also it goes far to explain otherwise unexplainable
visitations. Truly, as Hobley says in his unexcelled work on the
A-Kamba, “the life of a savage native is a complex matter, and he is
hedged round by all sorts of rules and prohibitions, the infringement
of which will probably cause his death, if only by the intense belief he
has in the rules which guide his life.”
* Customs are not universal among the different tribes. I am
merely illustrating.
For these rules and customs he never attempts to give a reason. They
are; and that is all there is to it. A mere statement: “This is the
custom” settles the matter finally. There is no necessity, nor passing
thought even, of finding any logical cause. The matter was worked out
in the mental evolution of remote ancestors. At that time, perhaps,
insurgent and Standpatter, Conservative and Radical fought out the
questions of the day, and the Muckrakers swung by their tails and
chattered about it. Those days are all long since over. The questions
of the world are settled forever. The people have passed through the
struggles of their formative period to the ultimate highest perfection
of adjustment to material and spiritual environment of which they were
capable under the influence of their original racial force.
Parenthetically, it is now a question whether or not an added impulse
can be communicated from without. Such an impulse must (a) unsettle all
the old beliefs, (b) inspire an era of skepticism, (c) reintroduce the
old struggle of ideas between the Insurgent and the Standpatter, and
Radical and the Conservative, (d) in the meantime furnish, from the
older civilization, materials, both in the thought-world and in the
object-world, for building slowly a new set of customs more closely
approximating those we are building for ourselves. This is a longer
and slower and more complicated affair than teaching the native to wear
clothes and sing hymns; or to build houses and drink gin; but it is what
must be accomplished step by step before the African peoples are really
civilized. I, personally, do not think it can be done.
Now having, a hundred thousand years or so ago, worked out the highest
good of the human race, according to them, what must they say to
themselves and what must their attitude be when the white man has come
and has unrolled his carpet of wonderful tricks? The dilemma is evident.
Either we, as black men, must admit that our hundred-thousand-year-old
ideas as to what constitutes the highest type of human relation to
environment is all wrong, or else we must evolve a new attitude toward
this new phenomena. It is human nature to do the latter. Therefore the
native has not abandoned his old gods; nor has he adopted a new. He
still believes firmly that his way is the best way of doing things, but
he acknowledges the Superman.
To the Superman, with all races, anything is possible. Only our Superman
is an idea, and ideal. The native has his Superman before him in the
actual flesh.
We will suppose that our own Superman has appeared among us,
accomplishing things that apparently contravene all our established
tenets of skill, of intellect, of possibility. It will be readily
acknowledged that such an individual would at first create some
astonishment. He wanders into a crowded hotel lobby, let us say,
evidently with the desire of going to the bar. Instead of pushing
laboriously through the crowd, he floats just above their heads, gets
his drink, and floats out again! That is levitation, and is probably
just as simple to him as striking a match is to you and me. After we
get thoroughly accustomed to him and his life, we are no longer vastly
astonished, though always interested, at the various manifestations
of his extraordinary powers. We go right along using the marvellous
wireless, aeroplanes, motor cars, constructive machinery, and the
like that make us confident-justly, of course-in that we are about the
smartest lot of people on earth. And if we see red, white, and blue
streamers of light crossing the zenith at noon, we do not manifest any
very profound amazement. “There's that confounded Superman again,” we
mutter, if we happen to be busy. “I wonder what stunt he's going to do
now!”
A consideration of the above beautiful fable may go a little way toward
explaining the supposed native stolidity in the face of the white man's
wonders. A few years ago some misguided person brought a balloon to
Nairobi. The balloon interested the white people a lot, but everybody
was chiefly occupied wondering what the natives would do when they saw
THAT! The natives did not do anything. They gathered in large numbers,
and most interestedly watched it go up, and then went home again. But
they were not stricken with wonder to any great extent. So also with
locomotives, motor cars, telephones, phonographs-any of our modern
ingenuities. The native is pleased and entertained, but not astonished.
“Stupid creature, no imagination,” say we, because our pride in showing
off is a wee bit hurt.
Why should he be astonished? His mental revolution took place when he
saw the first match struck. It is manifestly impossible for any one to
make fire instantaneously by rubbing one small stick. When for the first
time he saw it done, he was indeed vastly astounded. The immutable had
been changed. The law had been transcended. The impossible had been
accomplished. And then, as logical sequence, his mind completed the
syllogism. If the white man can do this impossibility, why not all the
rest? To defy the laws of nature by flying in the air or forcing great
masses of iron to transport one, is no more wonderful than to defy
them by striking a light. Since the white man can provedly do one, what
earthly reason exists why he should not do anything else that hits his
fancy? There is nothing to get astonished at.
This does not necessarily mean that the native looks on the white man
as a god. On the contrary, your African is very shrewd in the reading of
character. But indubitably white men possess great magic, uncertain in
its extent.
That is as far as I should care to go, without much deeper acquaintance,
into the attitude of the native mind toward the whites. A superficial
study of it, beyond the general principals I have enunciated, discloses
many strange contradictions. The native respects the white man's warlike
skill, he respects his physical prowess, he certainly acknowledges
tacitly his moral superiority in the right to command. In case of
dispute he likes the white man's adjudication; in case of illness the
man's medicine; in case of trouble the white man's sustaining hand. Yet
he almost never attempts to copy the white man's appearance or ways of
doing things. His own savage customs and habits he fulfils with as much
pride as ever in their eternal fitness. Once I was badgering Memba Sasa,
asking him whether he thought the white skin or the black skin the more
ornamental. “You are not white,” he retorted at last. “That,” pointing
to a leaf of my notebook, “is white. You are red. I do not like the
looks of red people.”
They call our speech the “snake language,” because of its hissing sound.
Once this is brought to your attention, indeed, you cannot help noticing
the superabundance of the sibilants.
A queer melange the pigeonholes of an African's brain must contain-fear
and respect, strongly mingled with clear estimate of intrinsic character
of individuals and a satisfaction with his own standards.
Nor, I think, do we realize sufficiently the actual fundamental
differences between the African and our peoples. Physically they must
be in many ways as different from our selves as though they actually
belonged to a different species. The Masai are a fine big race,
enduring, well developed and efficient. They live exclusively on cow's
milk mixed with blood; no meat, no fruit, no vegetables, no grain;
just that and nothing more. Obviously they must differ from us most
radically, or else all our dietetic theories are wrong. It is a
well-known fact that any native requires a triple dose of white man's
medicine. Furthermore a native's sensitiveness to pain is very much
less than the white man's. This is indubitable. For example, the Wakamba
file-or, rather, chip, by means of a small chisel-all their front
teeth down to needle points, When these happen to fall out, the warrior
substitutes an artificial tooth which he drives down into the socket.
If the savage got the same effects from such a performance that a white
man's dental system would arouse, even “savage stoicism” would hardly
do him much good. There is nothing to be gained by multiplying examples.
Every African traveller can recall a thousand.
Incidentally, and by the way, I want to add to the milk-and-blood joke
on dietetics another on the physical culturists. We are all familiar
with the wails over the loss of our toe nails. You know what I mean;
they run somewhat like this: shoes are the curse of civilization; if
we wear them much longer we shall not only lose the intended use of our
feet, but we shall lose our toe nails as well; the savage man, etc.,
etc., etc. Now I saw a great many of said savage men in Africa, and I
got much interested in their toe nails, because I soon found that our
own civilized “imprisoned” toe nails were very much better developed. In
fact, a large number of the free and untramelled savages have hardly any
toe nails at all! Whether this upsets a theory, nullifies a sentimental
protest, or merely stands as an exception, I should not dare guess. But
the fact is indubitable.