THE CLASH OF CULTURES
Wherein this student, realising as usual, when too late, that the
environment of such opinions as are expressed above is boiling hot
water, calls to memory the excellent saying, "As well be hung for a
sheep as a lamb," and goes on.
I have no intention, however, of starting a sort of open-air steam
laundry for West African washing. I have only gone into the
unsatisfactory-to-all-parties-concerned state of affairs there not with
the hope, but with the desire, that things may be improved and further
disgrace avoided. It would be no good my merely stating that, if England
wishes to make her possessions there morally and commercially pay her
for the loss of life that holding them entails, she must abolish her
present policy of amateur experiments backed by good intentions, for you
would naturally not pay the least attention to a bald statement made by
merely me. So I have had to place before you the opinions of others who
are more worthy of your attention. I must, however, for myself disclaim
any right to be regarded as the mouthpiece of any party concerned,
though Major Lugard has done me the honour to place me amongst the
Liverpool merchants. I can claim no right to speak as one of them. I
should be only too glad if I had this honour, but I have not. There was
early this year a distressing split between Liverpool and myself--whom
I am aware they call behind my back "Our Aunt"--and I know they regard
me as a vexing, if even a valued, form of relative.
This split, I may say (remembering Mr. Mark Twain's axiom, that people
always like to know what a row is about), arose from my frank admiration
of both the Royal Niger Company and France, neither of which Liverpool
at that time regarded as worthy of even the admiration of the most
insignificant; so its _Journal of Commerce_ went for me. The natural
sweetness of my disposition is most clearly visible to the naked eye
when I am quietly having my own way, so naturally I went for its
_Journal of Commerce_. Providentially no one outside saw this deplorable
family row, and Mr. John Holt put a stop to it by saying to me, "Say
what you like, you cannot please all of us;" had it not been for this I
should not have written another line on the maladministration of West
Africa beyond saying, "Call that Crown Colony system you are working
there a Government! England, at your age, you ought to be ashamed of
yourself!" But you see, as things are, I am not speaking for any one,
only off on a little lone fight of my own against a state of affairs
which I regard as a disgrace to my country.
Well but, you may say, after all what you have said points to nothing
disgraceful. You have expressly said that there is no corruption in the
government there, and the rest of the things--the change of policy
arising from the necessity for white men to come home at the least every
twelve months, the waste of money necessary to local exigencies, and the
fact that officers and gentlemen cannot be expected to understand and
look after what one might call domestic expenses--may be things
unavoidable and peculiar to the climate. To this I can only say, Given
the climate, why do you persist in ignoring the solid mass of expert
knowledge of the region that is in the hands of the mercantile party,
and go on working your Governors from a non-expert base? You have in
England an unused but great mass of knowledge among men of all classes
who have personally dealt with West Africa--yet you do not work from
that, organise it, and place it at the service of the brand new
Governors who go out; far from it. I know hardly any more pathetic sight
than the new official suddenly appointed to West Africa buzzing round
trying to find out "what the place is really like, you know." I know
personally one of the greatest of our Governors who have been down
there, a man with iron determination and courage, who was not content
with the information derivable from a list of requisites for a tropical
climate, the shorter Hausa grammar and a nice cheery-covered little work
on diseases--the usual fillets with which England binds the brows of her
Sacrifices to the Coast--but went and read about West Africa, all by
himself, alone in the British Museum. He was a success, but still he
always declares that the only book he found about this particular part
was a work by a Belgian, with a frontispiece depicting the author, on an
awful river, in the act, as per inscription, of shouting, "Row on, brave
men of Kru!" which, as subsequent knowledge showed him that bravery was
not one of the main qualities of the Kru men, shook him up about all his
British Museum education. So in the end he, like the rest, had to learn
for himself, out there. Of course, if the Governors were carefully
pegged down to a West African place and lived long enough, and were not
by nature faddists, doubtless they would learn, and in the course of a
few years things would go well; but they are not pegged down. No sooner
does one of them begin to know about the country he is in charge of than
off he is whisked and deposited again, in a brand new region for which
West Africa has not been a fitting introduction.
Then, as for the domestic finance, why expect officers and lawyers,
doctors and gentlemen from clubland to manage fiscal matters? Of course
they naturally don't know about trade affairs, or whether the Public
Works Department is spending money, or merely wasting it. You require
professional men in West Africa, but not to do half the work they are
now engaged on in connection with red tape and things they do not
understand. Of course, errors of this kind may be merely Folly, you may
have plenty more men as good as these to replace them with, so it may
matter more to their relations than to England if they are wasted alike
in life and death, and you are so rich that the gradual extinction of
your tropical trade will not matter to your generation. But as a
necessary consequent to this amateurism, or young gentlemen's academy
system, the Crown Colony system, there is disgrace in the injustice to
and disintegration of the native races it deals with.
Now when I say England is behaving badly to the African, I beg you not
to think that the philanthropic party has increased. I come of a
generation of Danes who when the sun went down on the Wulpensand were
the men to make light enough to fight by with their Morning Stars; and
who, later on, were soldiers in the Low Countries and slave owners in
the West Indies, and I am proud of my ancestors; for, whatever else they
were, they were not humbugs; and the generation that is round me now
seems to me in its utterances at any rate tainted with humbug. I own
that I hate the humbug in England's policy towards weaker races for the
sake of all the misery on white and black it brings; and I think as I
see you wasting lives and money, sowing debt and difficulties all over
West Africa by a hut tax war in Sierra Leone, fighting for the sake of
getting a few shillings you have no right to whatsoever out of the
African,--who are you that you should point your finger in scorn at my
tribe? I as one of that tribe blush for you, from the basis that you are
a humbug and not scientific, which, I presume you will agree is not the
same thing as my being a philanthropist.
I had the honour of meeting in West Africa an English officer who had
previously been doing some fighting in South Africa. He said he "didn't
like being a butterman's nigger butcher." "Oh! you're all right here
then," I said; "you're out now for Exeter Hall, the plane of
civilisation, the plough, and the piano." I will not report his remarks
further; likely enough it was the mosquitoes that made him say things,
and of course I knew with him, as I know with you, butchery of any sort
is not to your liking, though war when it's wanted is; the distinction I
draw between them is a hard and fast one. There is just the same
difference to my mind between an unnecessary war on an unarmed race and
a necessary war on the same race, as there is between killing game that
you want to support yourself with or game that is destructive to your
interests, and on the other hand the killing of game just to say that
you have done it. This will seem a deplorably low view to take, but it
is one supported by our history. We have killed down native races in
Australasia and America, and it is no use slurring over the fact that we
have profited by so doing. This argument, however, cannot be used in
favour of killing down the African in tropical Africa, more particularly
in Western Tropical Africa. If you were to-morrow to kill every native
there, what use would the country be to you? No one else but the native
can work its resources; you cannot live in it and colonise it. It would
therefore be only an extremely interesting place for the zoologist,
geologist, mineralogist, &c., but a place of no good to any one else in
England.
This view, however, of the profit derivable from and justifying war you
will refuse to discuss; stating that such profit in your wars you do not
seek; that they have been made for the benefit of the African himself,
to free him from his native oppressors in the way of tyrannical chiefs
and bloody superstitions, and to elevate him in the plane of
civilisation. That this has been the intention of our West African wars
up to the Sierra Leone war, which was forced on you for fiscal reasons,
I have no doubt: but that any of them advanced you in your mission to
elevate the African, I should hesitate to say. I beg to refer you to Dr.
Freeman's opinions on the Ashantee wars on this point,[74] but for
myself I should say that the blame of the failure of these wars to
effect their desired end has been due to the want of power to
re-organise native society after a war; for example, had the 1873
Ashantee war been followed by the taking over of Ashantee and the strong
handling of it, there would not have been an 1895 Ashantee war; or, to
take it the other way, if you had followed up the battle of Katamansu in
1827, you need not have had an 1874 war even. Dr. Freeman holds, that if
you had let the Ashantis have a sea-port and generally behaved fairly
reasonably, you need hardly have had Ashantee wars at all. But, however
this may be, I think that a good many of the West African wars of the
past ten years have been the result of the humbug of the previous sixty,
during which we have proclaimed that we are only in Africa for peaceful
reasons of commerce, and religion, and education, not with any desire
for the African's land or property: that, of course, it is not possible
for us to extend our friendship or our toleration to people who go in
for cannibalism, slave-raiding, or human sacrifices, but apart from
these matters we have no desire to meddle with African domestic affairs,
or take away their land. This, I own, I believe to have honestly been
our intention, and to be our intention still, but with our stiff Crown
Colony system of representing ourselves to the African, this intention
has been and will be impossible to carry out, because between the true
spirit of England and the spirit of Africa it interposes a distorting
medium. It is, remember, not composed of Englishmen alone, it includes
educated natives, and yet it knows the true native only through
interpreters.
But why call this humbug? you say. Well, the present policy in Africa
makes it look so. Frankly, I do not see how you could work your original
policy out unless it were in the hands of extremely expert men, patient
and powerful at that. Too many times in old days have you allowed white
men to be bullied, to give the African the idea that you, as a nation,
meant to have your way. Too many times have you allowed them to violate
parts of their treaties under your nose, until they got out of the way
of thinking you would hold them to their treaties at all, and then
suddenly down you came on them, not only holding them to their side of
the treaties, but not holding to your own, imposing on them
restrictions and domestic interference which those treaties made no
mention of at all. I have before me now copies of treaties with chiefs
in the hinterland of our Crown Colonies, wherein there is not even the
anti-slavery clause--treaties merely of friendship and trade, with the
undertaking on the native chief's part to hand over no part or right in
his territories to a foreign power without English Government consent.
Yet, in the districts we hold from the natives under such treaties, we
are contemplating direct taxation, which to the African means the
confiscation of the property taxed. We have, in fact, by our previous
policy placed ourselves to the African with whom we have made treaties,
in the position of a friend. "Big friend," it is true, but not conqueror
or owner. Our departure now from the "big friend" attitude into the
position of owner, hurts his feelings very much; and coupled with the
feeling that he cannot get at England, who used to talk so nicely to
him, and whom he did his best to please, as far as local circumstances
and his limited power would allow, by giving up customs she had an
incomprehensible aversion to, it causes the African chief to say "God is
up," by which I expect he means the Devil, and give way to war, or
sickness, or distraction, or a wild, hopeless, helpless, combination of
all three; and then, poor fellow, when he is only naturally suffering
from the dazzles your West African policy would give to an iron post,
you go about sagely referring to "a general antipathy to civilisation
among the natives of West Africa," "anti-white-man's leagues," "horrible
secret societies," and such like figments of your imagination; and
likely enough throw in as a dash for top the statement that the chief is
"a drunken slave-raider," which as the captain of the late s.s.
_Sparrow_ would say, "It may be so, and again, it mayn't." Anyhow it
seems to occur to you as an argument only after the war is begun, though
you have known the man some years; and it has not been the ostensible
reason for any West African war save those in the Niger Company's
territories, which run far enough inland to touch the slave-raiding
zone, and which are entirely excluded from my arguments because they
have been in the hands of experts on West Africa in war-making and in
war-healing.
Our past wars in West Africa, I mean all our wars prior to the hut-tax
war, have been wars in order to suppress human sacrifice, to protect one
tribe from the aggression of another, and to prevent the stopping of
trade by middlemen tribes. These things are things worth fighting for.
The necessity we have been under to fight them has largely arisen from
our ancestors shirking a little firm-handedness in their generation.
There is very little doubt that, owing to a want of reconstruction after
destruction, these wars have not been worth to the Empire the loss of
life and money they have cost; but this is nothing against us as
fighters nor any real disgrace to our honour, but merely a slur on our
intellectual powers in the direction of statecraft. They are wars of a
totally different character to those of the hut-tax kind, that arise
from aggressions on native property: the only thing in common between
them is the strain of poor statecraft. This imperfection, however,
exists to a far greater extent in hut-tax war, for to it we owe that
general feeling of dislike to the advance of civilisation you now hear
referred to. That, to a certain extent, this dislike already exists as
the necessary outcome of our policy of late years, and that it will
increase yearly, I fear there is very little doubt. It is the toxin
produced by the microbe. It is the consequence of our attempt to
introduce direct taxation, which seems to me to be an affair identical
with your greased cartridges for India. Doubtless, such people ought not
to object to greased cartridges; but, doubtless, such people as we are
ought not to give them, and commit, over again, a worthless blunder,
with no bad intention be it granted, but with no common sense.
It has been said that the Sierra Leone hut-tax war is "a little Indian
mutiny"; those who have said it do not seem to have known how true the
statement is, for these attacks on property in the form of direct
taxation are, to the African, treachery on the part of England, who,
from the first, has kept on assuring the African that she does not mean
to take his country from him, and then, as soon as she is strong enough,
in his eyes, deliberately starts doing it. When you once get between two
races the feeling of treachery, the face of their relationship is
altered for ever, altered in a way that no wholesome war, no brutality
of individuals, can alter. Black and white men for ever after a national
breach of faith tax each other with treachery, and never really trust
each other again.
The African, however, must not be confounded with the Indian.
Externally, in his habits he is in a lower culture state; he has no
fanatical religion that really resents the incursions of other religions
on his mind; Fetish can live in and among all sorts and kinds of
religions without quarrelling with them in the least, grievously as they
quarrel with Fetish; he has no written literature to keep before his
eyes a glorious and mythical past, which, getting mixed up with his
religious ideas, is liable in the Indian to make him take at times
lobster-like backward springs in the direction of that past, though it
was never there, and he would not have relished it if it had been.
Nevertheless, the true Negro is, I believe, by far the better man than
the Asiatic; he is physically superior, and he is more like an
Englishman than the Asiatic; he is a logical, practical man, with
feelings that are a credit to him, and are particularly strong in the
direction of property; he has a way of thinking he has rights, whether
he likes to use them or no, and will fight for them when he is driven to
it. Fight you for a religious idea the African will not. He is not the
stuff you make martyrs out of, nor does he desire to shake off the
shackles of the flesh and swoon into Nirvana; and although he will sit
under a tree to any extent, provided he gets enough to eat and a
little tobacco, he won't sit under trees on iron spikes, or hold
a leg up all the time, or fakirise in any fashion for the benefit
of his soul or yours. His make of mind is exceedingly like the make
of mind of thousands of Englishmen of the stand-no-nonsense,
Englishman's-house-is-his-castle type. Yet, withal, a law-abiding man,
loving a live lord, holding loudly that women should be kept in their
place, yet often grievously henpecked by his wives, and little better
than a slave to his mother, whom he loves with a love he gives to none
other. This love of his mother is so dominant a factor in his life that
it must be taken into consideration in attempting to understand the true
Negro. Concerning it I can do no better than give you the Reverend
Leighton Wilson's words; for this great missionary knew, as probably
none since have known, the true Negro, having laboured for many years
amongst the most unaltered Negro tribes--the Grain coast tribes--and his
words are as true to-day of the unaltered Negro as on the day he wrote
them thirty-eight years ago, and Leighton Wilson, mind you, was no blind
admirer of the African.
"Whatever other estimate we may form of the African, we may not doubt
his love for his mother. Her name, whether dead or alive, is always on
his lips and in his heart. She is the first being he thinks of when
awakening from his slumbers and the last he remembers when closing his
eyes in sleep; to her he confides secrets which he would reveal to no
other human being on the face of the earth. He cares for no one else in
time of sickness, she alone must prepare his food, administer his
medicine, perform his ablutions, and spread his mat for him. He flies to
her in the hour of his distress, for he well knows if all the rest of
the world turn against him she will be steadfast in her love, whether he
be right or wrong.
"If there be any cause which justifies a man in using violence towards
one of his fellow men it would be to resent an insult offered to his
mother. More fights are occasioned among boys by hearing something said
in disparagement of their mothers than all other causes put together. It
is a common saying among them, if a man's mother and his wife are both
on the point of being drowned, and he can save only one of them, he must
save his mother, for the avowed reason if the wife is lost he may marry
another, but he will never find a second mother."[75]
Among the tribes of whom Wilson is speaking above, it is the man's true
mother. Among the Niger Delta tribes it is often the adopted mother, the
woman who has taken him when, as a child, he has been left motherless,
or, if he is a boughten child, the woman who has taken care of him.
Among both, and throughout all the bushmen tribes in West Africa,
however, this deep affection is the same; next to the mother comes the
sister to the African, and this matter has a bearing politically.
There is little doubt that there exists a distrustful feeling towards
white culture. Up to our attempt to enforce direct taxation it was only
a distrustful feeling that a few years careful, honest handling would
have disposed of. Since our attempt there is no doubt there is something
approaching a panicky terror of white civilisation in all the native
aristocracies and property owners. It is not, I repeat, to be attributed
to Fetish priests. Certainly, on the whole, it is not attributable to a
dislike of European customs or costumes; it is the reasonable dislike to
being dispossessed alike of power and property in what they regard as
their own country. A considerable factor in this matter is undoubtedly
the influence of the women--the mothers of Africa. Just as your African
man is the normal man, so is your African woman the normal woman. I
openly own that if I have a soft spot in my feelings it is towards
African women; and the close contact I have lived in with them has given
rise to this, and, I venture to think, made me understand them. I know
they have their faults. For one thing they are not so religiously minded
as the men. I have met many African men who were philosophers, thinking
in the terms of Fetish, but never a woman so doing. Be it granted that
on the whole they know more about the details of Fetish procedure than
the men do. Yet though frightened of them all, a blind faith in any
mortal Ju Ju they do not possess. Your African lady is artful with them,
not philosophic, possibly because she has other things to do--what with
attending to the children, the farm, and the market--than go mooning
about as those men can. For another thing they go in for husband
poisoning in a way I am unable to approve of.
Well, it may be interesting to inquire into the reasons that make the
West African woman a factor against white civilisation. These reasons
are--firstly, that she does not know practically anything about it; and,
secondly, she has the normal feminine dislike to innovations. Missionary
and other forms of white education have not been given to the African
women to anything like the same extent that they have been given to the
men. I do not say that there are not any African women who are not
thoroughly educated in white education, for there are, and they can
compare very favourably from the standpoint of their education with our
normal women; but these have, I think I may safely say, been the
daughters of educated African men, or have been the women who have been
immediately attached to some mission station. I have no hesitation in
saying that, considering the very little attention that has been given
to the white education of the African women, they give evidence of an
ability in due keeping with that of the African men. But all I mean to
say is, that our white culture has not had a grasp over the womankind of
Africa that can compare with that it has had over the men; for one woman
who has been brought home to England and educated in our schools, and
who has been surrounded by English culture, &c., there are 500 men. But
into the possibilities of the African woman in the white education
department I do not mean to go; I am getting into a snaggy channel by
speaking on woman at all. It is to the mass of African women, untouched
by white culture, but with an enormous influence over their sons and
brothers, that I am now referring as a factor in the dislike to the
advance of white civilisation; and I have said they do not like it
because, for one thing, they do not know it; that is to say, they do not
know it from the inside and at its best, but only from the outside.
Viewed from the outside in West Africa white civilisation, to a shrewd
mind like hers, is an evil thing for her boys and girls. She sees it
taking away from them the restraints of their native culture, and in all
too many cases leading them into a life of dissipation, disgrace, and
decay; or, if it does not do this, yet separating the men from their
people.
The whole of this affair requires a whole mass of elaborate explanations
to place it fairly before you, but I will merely sketch the leading
points now. (1) The law of muetterrecht makes the tie between the mother
and the children far closer than that between the father and them: white
culture reverses this, she does not like that. (2) Between husband and
wife there is no community in goods under native law; each keeps his and
her separate estate. White culture says the husband shall endow his wife
with all his worldly goods; this she knows usually means, that if he has
any he does not endow her with them, but whether he has or has not he
endows himself with hers as far as any law permits. Similarly he does
not like it either. These two white culture things, saddling him with
the support of the children and endowing his wife with all his property,
presents a repulsive situation to the logical African. Moreover, white
culture expects him to think more of his wife and children than he does
of his mother and sisters, which to the uncultured African is absurd.
Then again both he and his mother see the fearful effects of white
culture on the young women, who cannot be prevented in districts under
white control from going down to the coast towns and to the Devil:
neither he nor the respectable old ladies of his tribe approve of this.
Then again they know that the young men of their people who have
thoroughly allied themselves to white culture look down on their
relations in the African culture state. They call the ancestors of their
tribe "polygamists," as if it were a swear-word, though they are a
thousand times worse than polygamists themselves: and they are ashamed
of their mothers. It is a whole seething mass of stuff all through and I
would not mention it were it not that it is a factor in the formation of
anti-white-culture opinion among the mass of the West Africans, and that
it causes your West African bush chief to listen to the old woman whom
you may see crouching behind him, or you may not see at all, but who is
with him all the same, when she says, "Do not listen to the white man,
it is bad for you." He knows that the interpreter talking to him for the
white man may be a boughten man, paid to advertise the advantages of
white ways; and he knows that the old woman, his mother, cannot be
bought where his interest is concerned: so he listens to her, and she
distrusts white ways.
I am aware that there is now in West Africa a handful of Africans who
have mastered white culture, who know it too well to misunderstand the
inner spirit of it, who are men too true to have let it cut them off in
either love or sympathy from Africa,--men that, had England another
system that would allow her to see them as they are, would be of greater
use to her and Africa than they now are; but I will not name them: I
fight a lone fight, and wish to mix no man, white or black, up in it, or
my heretical opinions. That handful of African men are now fighting a
hard enough fight to prevent the distracted, uninformed Africans from
rising against what looks so like white treachery, though it is only
white want of knowledge; and also against those "water flies" who are
neither Africans nor Europeans, but who are the curse of the Coast--the
men who mislead the white man and betray the black.
Next to this there is another factor almost equally powerful, with which
I presume you cannot sympathise, and which I should make a mess of if I
trusted myself to explain. Therefore I call in the aid of a better
writer, speaking on another race, but talking of the identical same
thing. "In these days the boot of the ubiquitous white man leaves its
mark on all the fair places of the earth, and scores thereon an even
more gigantic track than that which affrighted Robinson Crusoe in his
solitude. It crushes down the forest, beats out roads, strides across
the rivers, kicks down native institutions, and generally tramples on
the growths of natives and the works of primitive man, reducing all
things to that dead level of conventionality which we call civilisation.
"Incidentally it stamps out much of what is best in the customs and
characteristics of the native races against which it brushes; and though
it relieves him of many things which hurt or oppressed him ere it came,
it injures him morally almost as much as it benefits him materially. We
who are white men admire our work not a little--which is natural, and
many are found willing to wear out their souls in efforts to convert the
thirteenth century into the nineteenth in a score of years. The natives,
who for the most part are frank Vandals, also admire efforts of which
they are aware that they are themselves incapable, and even the
_laudator temporis acti_ has his mouth stopped by the cheap and often
tawdry luxury which the coming of the white man has placed within his
reach. So effectually has the heel of the white man been ground into the
face of Perak and Selangor, that these native states are now only
nominally what their name implies. The white population outnumbers the
people of the land in most of the principal districts, and it is
possible for a European to spend weeks in either of these states without
coming into contact with any Asiatics save those who wait at table,
clean his shirts, or drive his cab. It is possible, I am told, for a
European to spend years in Perak or Selangor without acquiring any
profound knowledge of the natives of the country or of the language
which is their special medium. This being so, most of the white men who
live in the protected native states are somewhat apt to disregard the
effect their actions have upon the natives and labour under the common
European inability to view natives from a native standpoint. Moreover,
we have become accustomed to existing conditions; and thus it is that
few perhaps realise the precise nature of the work which the British in
the Peninsula have set themselves to accomplish. What we are really
attempting, however, is nothing less than to crush into twenty years the
revolution in facts and in ideas, which, even in energetic Europe, six
long centuries have been needed to accomplish. No one will, of course,
be found to dispute that the strides made in our knowledge of the art of
government since the thirteenth century are prodigious and vast, nor
that the general condition of the people of Europe has been immensely
improved since that day; but nevertheless one cannot but sympathise with
the Malays who are suddenly and violently translated from the point to
which they have attained in the natural development of their race, and
are required to live up to the standard of a people who are six
centuries in advance of them in national progress. If a plant is made
to blossom or bear fruit three months before its time it is regarded as
a triumph of the gardener's art; but what then are we to say of this
huge moral forcing system we call 'protection'? Forced plants we know
suffer in the process; and the Malay, whose proper place is amidst the
conditions of the thirteenth century, is apt to become morally weak and
seedy and lose something of his robust self respect when he is forced to
bear Nineteenth century fruit."[76]
Now, the above represents the state of affairs caused by the clash of
different culture levels in the true Negro States, as well as it does in
the Malay. These two sets of men, widely different in breed, have from
the many points of agreement in their State-form, evidently both arrived
in our thirteenth century. The African peoples in the central East, and
East, and South, except where they are true Negroes, have not arrived in
the Thirteenth century, or, to put it in other words, the true Negro
stem in Africa has arrived at a political state akin to that of our own
Thirteenth century, whereas the Bantu stem has not; this point, however,
I need not enter into here.
There are, of course, local differences between the Malay Peninsula and
West Africa, but the main characteristics as regards the State-form
among the natives are singularly alike. They are both what Mr. Clifford
aptly likens to our own European State-form in the Thirteenth century;
and the effect of the white culture on the morals of the natives is also
alike. The main difference between them results from the Malay Peninsula
being but a narrow strip of land and thinly peopled, compared to the
densely populated section of a continent we call West Africa. Therefore,
although the Malay in his native state is a superior individual warrior
to the West African, yet there are not so many of him; and as he is less
guarded from whites by a pestilential climate, his resistance to the
white culture of the Nineteenth century is inferior to the resistance
which the West African can give.
The destruction of what is good in the Thirteenth century culture level,
and the fact that when the Nineteenth century has had its way the main
result is seedy demoralised natives, is the thing that must make all
thinking men wonder if, after all, such work is from a high moral point
of view worth the Nineteenth century doing. I so often think when I hear
the progress of civilisation, our duty towards the lower races, &c.,
talked of, as if those words were in themselves Ju Ju, of that improving
fable of the kind-hearted she-elephant, who, while out walking one day,
inadvertently trod upon a partridge and killed it, and observing close
at hand the bird's nest full of callow fledglings, dropped a tear, and
saying "I have the feelings of a mother myself," sat down upon the
brood. This is precisely what England representing the Nineteenth
century is doing in Thirteenth century West Africa. She destroys the
guardian institution, drops a tear and sits upon the brood with motherly
intentions; and pesky warm sitting she finds it, what with the nature of
the brood and the surrounding climate, let alone the expense of it. And
what profit she is going to get out of such proceedings there, I own I
don't know. "Ah!" you say, "yes, it is sad, but it is inevitable." I do
not think it is inevitable, unless you have no intellectual constructive
Statecraft, and are merely in that line an automaton. If you will try
Science, all the evils of the clash between the two culture periods
could be avoided, and you could assist these West Africans in their
Thirteenth century state to rise into their Nineteenth century state
without their having the hard fight for it that you yourself had. This
would be a grand humanitarian bit of work; by doing it you would raise a
monument before God to the honour of England such as no nation has ever
yet raised to Him on Earth.
There is absolutely no perceivable sound reason why you should not do it
if you will try Science and master the knowledge of the nature of the
native and his country. The knowledge of native laws, religion,
institutions, and State-form would give you the knowledge of what is
good in these things, so that you might develop and encourage them; and
the West African, having reached a Thirteenth century state, has
institutions and laws which with a strengthening from the European hand
would by their operation now stamp out the evil that exists under the
native state. What you are doing now, however, is the direct contrary to
this: you are destroying the good portion and thereby allowing what is
evil, or imperfect, in it as in all things human, to flourish under your
protection far more rankly than under the purely native Thirteenth
century State-form, with Fetish as a state religion, it could possibly
do.
I know, however, there is one great objection to your taking up a
different line towards native races to that which you are at present
following. It is one of those strange things that are in men's minds
almost without their knowing they are there, yet which, nevertheless,
rule them. This is the idea that those Africans are, as one party would
say, steeped in sin, or, as another party would say, a lower or degraded
race. While you think these things, you must act as you are acting. They
really are the same idea in different clothes. They both presuppose all
mankind to have sprung from a single pair of human beings, and the
condition of a race to-day therefore to be to its own credit or blame. I
remember one day in Cameroons coming across a young African lady, of the
age of twelve, who I knew was enjoying the advantages of white tuition
at a school. So, in order to open up conversation, I asked her what she
had been learning. "Ebberyting," she observed with a genial smile. I
asked her then what she knew, so as to approach the subject from a
different standpoint for purposes of comparison. "Ebberyting," she said.
This hurt my vanity, for though I am a good deal more than twelve years
of age, I am far below this state of knowledge; so I said, "Well, my
dear, and if you do, you're the person I have long wished to meet, for
you can tell me why you are black." "Oh yes," she said, with a perfect
beam of satisfaction, "one of my pa's pa's saw dem Patriark Noah wivout
his clothes." I handed over to her a crimson silk necktie that I was
wearing, and slunk away, humbled by superior knowledge. This, of course,
was the result of white training direct on the African mind; the story
which you will often be told to account for the blackness and whiteness
of men by Africans who have not been in direct touch with European, but
who have been in touch with Muhammedan, tradition--which in the main has
the same Semitic source--is that when Cain killed Abel, he was horrified
at himself, and terrified of God; and so he carried the body away from
beside the altar where it lay, and carried it about for years trying to
hide it, but not knowing how, growing white the while with the horror
and the fear; until one day he saw a crow scratching a hole in the
desert sand, and it struck him that if he made a hole in the sand and
put the body in, he could hide it from God, so he did; but all his
children were white, and from Cain came the white races, while Abel's
children are black, as all men were before the first murder. The present
way of contemplating different races, though expressed in finer
language, is practically identical with these; not only the religious
view, but the view of the suburban agnostic. The religious European
cannot avoid regarding the races in a different and inferior culture
state to his own as more deeply steeped in sin than himself, and the
suburban agnostic regards them as "degraded" or "retarded" either by
environment, or microbes, or both.
I openly and honestly own I sincerely detest touching on this race
question. For one thing, Science has not finished with it; for another,
it belongs to a group of subjects of enormous magnitude, upon which I
have no opinion, but merely feelings, and those of a nature which I am
informed by superior people would barely be a credit to a cave man of
the palaeolithic period. My feelings classify the world's inhabitants
into Englishmen, by which I mean Teutons at large, Foreigners, and
Blacks. Blacks I subdivide into two classes, English Blacks and Foreign
Blacks. English Blacks are Africans. Foreign Blacks are Indians,
Chinese, and the rest. Of course, everything that is not Teutonic is, to
put it mildly, not up to what is; and equally, of course, I feel more at
home with and hold in greater esteem the English Black: a great, strong
Kruman, for example, with his front teeth filed, nothing much on but
oil, half a dozen wives, and half a hundred jujus, is a sort of person
whom I hold higher than any other form of native, let the other form
dress in silk, satin, or cashmere, and make what pretty things he
pleases. This is, of course, a general view; but I am often cornered
for the detail view, whether I can reconcile my admiration for Africans
with my statement that they are a different kind of human being to white
men. Naturally I can, to my own satisfaction, just as I can admire an
oak tree or a palm; but it is an uncommonly difficult thing to explain.
All I can say is, that when I come back from a spell in Africa, the
thing that makes me proud of being one of the English is not the manners
or customs up here, certainly not the houses or the climate; but it is
the thing embodied in a great railway engine. I once came home on a ship
with an Englishman who had been in South West Africa for seven unbroken
years; he was sane, and in his right mind. But no sooner did we get
ashore at Liverpool, than he rushed at and threw his arms round a
postman, to that official's embarrassment and surprise. Well, that is
just how I feel about the first magnificent bit of machinery I come
across: it is the manifestation of the superiority of my race.
In philosophic moments I call superiority difference, from a feeling
that it is not mine to judge the grade in these things. Careful
scientific study has enforced on me, as it has on other students, the
recognition that the African mind naturally approaches all things from a
spiritual point of view. Low down in culture or high up, his mind works
along the line that things happen because of the action of spirit upon
spirit; it is an effort for him to think in terms of matter. We think
along the line that things happen from the action of matter upon matter.
If it were not for the Asiatic religion we have accepted, it is, I
think, doubtful whether we should not be far more materialistic in
thought-form than we are. This steady sticking to the material side of
things, I think, has given our race its dominion over matter; the want
of it has caused the African to be notably behind us in this, and far
behind those Asiatic races who regard matter and spirit as separate in
essence, a thing that is not in the mind either of the Englishman or the
African. The Englishman is constrained by circumstances to perceive the
existence of an extra material world. The African regards spirit and
matter as undivided in kind, matter being only the extreme low form of
spirit. There must be in the facts of the case behind things, something
to account for the high perception of justice you will find in the
African, combined with an inability to think out a pulley or a lever
except under white tuition. Similarly, taking the true Negro States,
which are in its equivalent to our Thirteenth century, it accounts for
the higher level of morals in them than you would find in our Thirteenth
century; and I fancy this want of interest and inferiority in
materialism in the true Negro constitutes a reason why they will not
come into our Nineteenth century, but, under proper guidance could
attain to a Nineteenth century state of their own, which would show a
proportionate advance. The simile of the influence of the culture of
Rome, or rather let us say the culture of Greece spread by the force of
Rome, upon Barbarian culture is one often used to justify the hope that
English culture will have a similar effect on the African. This I do not
think is so. It is true the culture of Rome lifted the barbarians from
what one might call culture 9 to culture 17, but the Romans and the
barbarians were both white races. But you see now a similar lift in
culture in Africa by the influence of Mohammedan culture, for example in
the Hausa States and again in the Western Soudan, where there is no
fundamental race difference.
In both English and Mohammedan Berber influence on the African there is
another factor, apart from race difference; namely, that the two higher
cultures are in a healthier state than that of Rome was at the time it
mastered the barbarian mind; in both cases the higher culture has the
superior war force.
This seems to me simply to lay upon us English for the sake of our
honour that we keep clean hands and a cool head, and be careful of
Justice; to do this we must know what there is we wish to wipe out of
the African, and what there is we wish to put in, and so we must not
content ourselves by relying materially on our superior wealth and
power, and morally on catch phrases. All we need look to is justice.
Love for our fellow-man, pity, charity, mercy, we need not bother our
heads about, so long as we are just. These things are of value only when
they are used as means whereby we can attain justice. It is no use
saying that it matters to a Teuton whether the other race he deals with
is black, white, yellow--I can quite conceive that we should look down
on a pea-green form of humanity if we had the chance. Naturally, I think
this shows a very proper spirit. I should be the last to alter any of
our Teutonic institutions to please any race; but when it comes to
altering the institutions of another race, not for the reason even of
pleasing ourselves but merely on the plea that we don't understand them,
we are on different ground. If those ideas and institutions stand in the
way of our universal right to go anywhere we choose and live as honest
gentlemen, we have the power-right to alter them; but if they do not we
must judge them from as near a standard of pure Justice as we can attain
to.
There are many who hold murder the most awful crime a man can commit,
saying that thereby he destroys the image of his Maker; I hold that one
of the most awful crimes one nation can commit on another is destroying
the image of Justice, which in an institution is represented more truly
to the people by whom the institution has been developed, than in any
alien institution of Justice; it is a thing adapted to its environment.
This form of murder by a nation I see being done in the destruction of
what is good in the laws and institutions of native races. In some parts
of the world, this murder, judged from certain reasonable standpoints,
gives you an advantage; in West Africa, judged from any standpoint you
choose to take, it gives you no advantage. By destroying native
institutions there, you merely lower the moral of the African race, stop
trade, and the culture advantages it brings both to England and West
Africa. I again refer you to the object lesson before you now, the hut
tax war in Sierra Leone. Awful accusations have been made against the
officers and men who had the collecting of this tax. In the matter of
the native soldiery, there is no doubt these accusations are only too
well founded, but the root thing was the murder of institutions. The
worst of the whole of this miserable affair is that a precisely similar
miserable affair may occur at any time in any of our West African Crown
Colonies--to-morrow, any day,--until you choose to remove the Crown
Colony system of government.
It has naturally been exceedingly hard for men who know the colony and
the natives, with the experience of years in an unsentimental commercial
way, to keep civil tongues in their heads while their interests were
being wrecked by the action of the government; but whether or no the
white officers were or were not brutal in their methods we must presume
will be shown by Sir David Chalmers's report. I am unable to believe
they were. But there is no manner of doubt that outrages have been
committed, disgraceful to England, by the set of riff-raff rascal
Blacks, who had been turned out by, or who had run away from, the
hinterland tribes down into Sierra Leone Colony, and there been turned,
by an ill-informed government, into police, and sent back with power
into the very districts from which they had, shortly before, fled for
their crimes. I entirely sympathise, therefore, with the rage of
Liverpool and Manchester, and of every clear-minded common-sense
Englishman who knows what a thing the hut tax war has been. And I want
common-sense Englishmen to recognise that a system capable of such
folly, and under which such a thing could happen in an English
possession, is a system that must go. For a system that gets short of
money, from its own want of business-like ability, and then against all
expert advice goes and does the most unscientific thing conceivable
under the circumstances, to get more, is a thing that is a disgrace to
England. Yet the Sierra Leone Colony was capable of this folly, and the
people in London were capable of saying to Liverpool and Manchester,
that no difficulty was expected from the collection of the tax. If this
is so in our oldest colony, what reason have we to believe that in the
others we are safer? Any of them, in combination with London, may
to-morrow go and do the most unscientific thing conceivable, and
disgrace England, in order to procure more local revenue, and fail at
that.
The desire to develop our West African possessions is a worthy one in
its way, but better leave it totally alone than attempt it with your
present machinery; which the moment it is called upon to deal with the
administration of the mass of the native inhabitants gives such a
trouble. And remember it is not the only trouble your Crown colony
system can give; it has a few glorious opportunities left of further
supporting everything I have said about it, and more. But I will say no
more. You have got a grand rich region there, populated by an uncommon
fine sort of human being. You have been trying your present set of ideas
on it for over 400 years; they have failed in a heart-breaking drizzling
sort of way to perform any single solitary one of the things you say you
want done there. West Africa to-day is just a quarry of paving-stones
for Hell, and those stones were cemented in place with men's blood mixed
with wasted gold.
Prove it! you say. Prove it to yourself by going there--I don't mean to
Blazes--but to West Africa.
FOOTNOTES:
[74] _Ashantee and Jaman_, Freeman (Constable and Co., 1898).
[75] _Western Africa_, Wilson, 1856, p. 116.
[76] _East Coast Etchings._ H. Clifford, Singapore, 1896.