The Congo Free State Have Imported As Labourers Both West Indian
Negroes - Principally Barbadians - And Chinamen.
In both cases the
mortality has been terrible - more than the white mortality, which
competent authorities put down for the Congo at 77 per cent., and
the experiment has therefore failed.
It may be said that much of
this mortality has arisen from the way in which these labourers have
been treated in the Free State, but that this is not entirely the
case is demonstrated by the case of the Annamese in Congo Francais,
who are well treated. These Annamese are the political prisoners
arising from the French occupation of Tong-kin; and the mortality
among one gang of 100 of them who were employed to make the path
through swampy ground from Glass to Libreville - a distance of two
and a half miles - was seventy, and this although the swamp was
nothing particularly bad as swamps go, and was swept by sea-air the
whole way.
Even had the experiment of imported labour been successful for the
time being, I hold it would be a grave error to import labour into
Africa. For this reason, that Africa possesses in herself the most
magnificent mass of labour material in the whole world, and surely
if her children could build up, as they have, the prosperity and
trade of the Americas, she should, under proper guidance and good
management, be able to build up her own. But good guidance and
proper management are the things that are wanted - and are wanting.
It is impossible to go into this complicated question fully here,
and I will merely ask unprejudiced people who do not agree with me,
whether they do not think that as so much has been done with one
African tribe, the Krumen - a tribe possessing no material difference
in make of mind or body from hundreds of other tribes, but which
have merely been trained by white men in a different way from other
tribes - that there is room for great hope in the native labour
supply? And would not a very hopeful outlook for West Africa
regarding the labour question be possible, if a regime of common
sense were substituted for our present one?
This is of course the missionary question - a question which I feel
it is hopeless to attempt to speak of without being gravely
misunderstood, and which I therefore would willingly shirk
mentioning, but I am convinced that the future of Africa is not to
be dissociated from the future of its natives by the importation of
yellow races or Hindoos; and the missionary question is not to be
dissociated from the future of the African natives; and so the
subject must be touched on; and I preface my remarks by stating that
I have a profound personal esteem for several missionaries,
naturally, for it is impossible to know such men and women as Mr.
and Mrs. Dennis Kemp, of the Gold Coast, Mme. and M. Jacot, and Mme.
and M. Forget, and M. Gacon, and Dr. Nassau, of Gaboon, and many
others without recognising at once the beauty of their natures, and
the nobility of their intentions. Indeed, taken as a whole, the
missionaries must be regarded as superbly brave, noble-minded men
who go and risk their own lives, and often those of their wives and
children, and definitely sacrifice their personal comfort and safety
to do what, from their point of view, is their simple duty; but it
is their methods of working that have produced in West Africa the
results which all truly interested in West Africa must deplore; and
one is bound to make an admission that goes against one's insular
prejudice - that the Protestant English missionaries have had most to
do with rendering the African useless.
The bad effects that have arisen from their teaching have come
primarily from the failure of the missionary to recognise the
difference between the African and themselves as being a difference
not of degree but of kind. I am aware that they are supported in
this idea by several eminent ethnologists; but still there are a
large number of anatomical facts that point the other way, and a far
larger number still relating to mental attributes, and I feel
certain that a black man is no more an undeveloped white man than a
rabbit is an undeveloped hare; and the mental difference between the
two races is very similar to that between men and women among
ourselves. A great woman, either mentally or physically, will excel
an indifferent man, but no woman ever equals a really great man.
The missionary to the African has done what my father found them
doing to the Polynesians - "regarding the native minds as so many
jugs only requiring to be emptied of the stuff which is in them and
refilled with the particular form of dogma he is engaged in
teaching, in order to make them the equals of the white races."
This form of procedure works in very various ways. It eliminates
those parts of the native fetish that were a wholesome restraint on
the African. The children in the mission school are, be it granted,
better than the children outside it in some ways; they display great
aptitude for learning anything that comes in their way - but there is
a great difference between white and black children. The black
child is a very solemn thing. It comes into the world in large
quantities and looks upon it with its great sad eyes as if it were
weighing carefully the question whether or no it is a fit place for
a respectable soul to abide in. Four times in ten it decides that
it is not, and dies. If, however, it decides to stay, it passes
between two and three years in a grim and profound study -
occasionally emitting howls which end suddenly in a sob - whine it
never does. At the end of this period it takes to spoon food, walks
about and makes itself handy to its mother or goes into the mission
school.
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