If It Remains In The Native State It Has No Toys Of A
Frivolous Nature, A Little Hoe Or A
Little calabash are considered
better training; if it goes into the school, it picks up, with
astonishing rapidity, the lessons
Taught it there - giving rise to
hopes for its future which are only too frequently disappointed in a
few years' time. It is not until he reaches years of indiscretion
that the African becomes joyful; but, when he attains this age he
always does cheer up considerably, and then, whatever his previous
training may have been, he takes to what Mr. Kipling calls "boot"
with great avidity - and of this he consumes an enormous quantity.
For the next sixteen years, barring accidents, he "rips"; he rips
carefully, terrified by his many fetish restrictions, if he is a
pagan; but if he is in that partially converted state you usually
find him in when trouble has been taken with his soul - then he rips
unrestrained.
It is most unfair to describe Africans in this state as "converted,"
either in missionary reports or in attacks on them. They are not
converted in the least. A really converted African is a very
beautiful form of Christian; but those Africans who are the chief
mainstay of missionary reports and who afford such material for the
scoffer thereat, have merely had the restraint of fear removed from
their minds in the mission schools without the greater restraint of
love being put in its place.
The missionary-made man is the curse of the Coast, and you find him
in European clothes and without, all the way down from Sierra Leone
to Loanda. The pagans despise him, the whites hate him, still he
thinks enough of himself to keep him comfortable. His conceit is
marvellous, nothing equals it except perhaps that of the individual
rife among us which the Saturday Review once aptly described as "the
suburban agnostic"; and the "missionary man" is very much like the
suburban agnostic in his religious method. After a period of
mission-school life he returns to his country-fashion, and deals
with the fetish connected with it very much in the same way as the
suburban agnostic deals with his religion, i.e. he removes from it
all the inconvenient portions. "Shouldn't wonder if there might be
something in the idea of the immortality of the soul, and a future
Heaven, you know - but as for Hell, my dear sir, that's rank
superstition, no one believes in it now, and as for Sabbath-keeping
and food-restrictions - what utter rubbish for enlightened people!"
So the backsliding African deals with his country-fashion ideas: he
eliminates from them the idea of immediate retribution, etc., and
keeps the polygamy and the dances, and all the lazy, hazy-minded
native ways. The education he has received at the mission school in
reading and writing fits him for a commercial career, and as every
African is a born trader he embarks on it, and there are pretty
goings on! On the West Coast he frequently sets up in business for
himself; on the South-West Coast he usually becomes a sub-trader to
one of the great English, French, or German firms. On both Coasts
he gets himself disliked, and brings down opprobrium on all black
traders, expressed in language more powerful than select. This
wholesale denunciation of black traders is unfair, because there are
many perfectly straight trading natives; still the majority are
recruited from missionary school failures, and are utterly bad.
"Post hoc non propter hoc" is an excellent maxim, but one that never
seems to enter the missionary head down here. Highly disgusted and
pained at his pupils' goings-on, but absolutely convinced of the
excellence of his own methods of instruction, and the spiritual
equality, irrespective of colour, of Christians; the missionary
rises up, and says things one can understand him saying about the
bad influence of the white traders; stating that they lure the
pupils from the fold to destruction. These things are nevertheless
not true. Then the white trader hears them, and gets his back up
and says things about the effect of missionary training on the
African, which are true, but harsh, because it is not the
missionaries' intent to turn out skilful forgers, and unmitigated
liars, although they practically do so. My share when I drop in on
this state of mutual recrimination is to get myself into hot water
with both parties. The missionary thinks me misguided for regarding
the African's goings-on as part of the make of the man, and the
trader regards me as a soft-headed idiot when I state that it is not
the missionary's individual blame that a lamb recently acquired from
the fold has gone down the primrose path with the trust, or the rum.
Shade of Sir John Falstaff! what a life this is!
The two things to which the missionary himself ascribes his want of
success are polygamy and the liquor traffic. Now polygamy is, like
most other subjects, a difficult thing to form a just opinion on, if
before forming the opinion you make a careful study of the facts
bearing on the case. It is therefore advisable, if you wish to
produce an opinion generally acceptable in civilised circles, to
follow the usual recipe for making opinions - just take a prejudice
of your own, and fix it up with the so-called opinion of that class
of people who go in for that sort of prejudice too. I have got
myself so entangled with facts that I cannot follow this plan, and
therefore am compelled to think polygamy for the African is not an
unmixed evil; and that at the present culture-level of the African
it is not to be eradicated. This arises from two reasons; the first
is that it is perfectly impossible for one African woman to do the
work of the house, prepare the food, fetch water, cultivate the
plantations, and look after the children attributive to one man.
She might do it if she had the work in her of an English or Irish
charwoman, but she has not, and a whole villageful of African women
do not do the work in a week that one of these will do in a day.
Then, too, the African lady is quite indifferent as to what extent
her good man may flirt with other ladies so long only as he does not
go and give them more cloth and beads than he gives her; and the
second reason for polygamy lies in the custom well-known to
ethnologists, and so widely diffused that one might say it was
constant throughout all African tribes, only there are so many of
them whose domestic relationships have not been carefully observed.
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