# West African Studies/Chapter 16

CHAPTER XVI
THE CLASH OF CULTURES
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 butter-man'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, 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 middle-men 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."
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 mütterrecht 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 Pérak 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 Pérak 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."
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 palæolithic 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.
* ↑ Ashantee and Jaman, Freeman (Constable and Co., 1898).
* ↑ Western Africa, Wilson, 1856, p. 116.
* ↑ East Coast Etchings. H. Clifford, Singapore, 1896.
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