Still Any Technical School Is Better Than
None, And Apart From Lay Considerations, Is Of Great Religious Value
To The Mission Indirectly, For There Are Many Instances In Mission
Annals Of A Missionary Receiving Great Encouragement From The
Natives When He First Starts In A District.
At first the converts
flock in, get baptised in batches, go to church, attend school, and
adopt European clothes with an alacrity and enthusiasm that
frequently turns their devoted pastor's head, but after the lapse of
a few months their conduct is enough to break his heart.
Dressing
up in European clothes amuses the ladies and some of the young men
for a long time, in some cases permanently, but the older men and
the bolder youths soon get bored, and when an African is bored - and
he easily is so - he goes utterly to the bad. It is in these places
that an industrial mission would be so valuable to the spiritual
cause, for by employing and amusing the largely preponderating lower
faculties of the African's mind, it would give the higher faculties
time to develop. I have frequently been told when advocating
technical instruction, that there are objections against it from
spiritual standpoints, which, as my own views do not enable me to
understand them, I will not enter into. Also several authorities,
not mission authorities alone, state with ethnologists that the
African is incapable of learning, except during the period of
childhood.
Prof A. H. Keane says - "their inherent mental inferiority, almost
more marked than their physical characters, depends on physiological
causes by which the intellectual faculties seem to be arrested
before attaining their normal development"; and further on, "We must
necessarily infer that the development of the negro and white
proceeds on different lines. While with the latter the volume of
the brain grows with the expansion of the brain-pan; in the former
the growth of the brain is on the contrary arrested by the premature
closing of the cranial sutures, and lateral pressure of the frontal
bone." {504} You will frequently meet with the statement that the
negro child is as intelligent, or more so, than the white child, but
that as soon as it passes beyond childhood it makes no further
mental advance. Burton says: "His mental development is arrested,
and thenceforth he grows backwards instead of forwards." Now it is
nervous work contradicting these statements, but with all due
respect to the makers of them I must do so, and I have the comfort
of knowing that many men with a larger personal experience of the
African than these authorities have, agree with me, although at the
same time we utterly disclaim holding the opinion that the African
is a man and a brother. A man he is, but not of the same species;
and his cranial sutures do, I agree, close early; indeed I have seen
them almost obliterated in skulls of men who have died quite young;
but I think most anthropologists are nowadays beginning to see that
the immense value they a few years since set upon skull measurements
and cranial capacity, etc., has been excessive and not to have so
great a bearing on the intelligence as they thought. There has been
an enormous amount of material carefully collected, mainly by
Frenchmen, on craniology, which is exceedingly interesting, but full
of difficulty, and giving very diverse indications. Take the
weights of brain given by Topinard: -
and I think you will see for practical purposes such considerations
as weight of brain, or closure of sutures, etc., are negligible, and
so we need not get paralysed with respect for "physiological
causes." Moreover I may remark that the top-weight, the Hottentot,
was a lady, and that M. Broca weighed one negro's brain which scaled
1,500 grammes, while 105 English and Scotchmen only gave an average
of 1,427.
So I think we may make our minds easy on the safety of sticking to
outside facts, and say that after all it does not much affect the
question of capacity for industrial training in the African if he
does choose to close up the top of his head early, and that the
whole attempt to make out that the African is a child-form, "an
arrested development," is - well, not supported by facts. The very
comparison between white and black children's intelligence to the
disadvantage of the former is all wrong. The white child is not his
inferior; he is not so quick in picking up parlour tricks; but then
where are either of the children at that alongside a French poodle?
What happens to the African from my observations is just what
happens to the European, namely, when he passes out of childhood, he
goes into a period of hobbledehoyhood. During this period, his
skull might just as well be filled inside with wool as covered
outside with it. But after a time, during which he has succeeded in
distracting and discouraging the white men who hoped so much of him
when he was a child, his mind clears up again and goes ahead all
right. It is utter rubbish to say "You cannot teach an adult
African," and that "he grows backwards"; for even without white
interference he gets more and more cunning as the time goes on.
Does any one who knows them feel inclined to tell me that those old
palm-oil chiefs have not learnt a thing or two during their lives?
or that a well-matured bush trader has not? Go down to West Africa
yourself, if you doubt this, and carry on a series of experiments
with them in subjects they know of - trade subjects - try and get the
best of a whole series of matured adults, male or female, and I can
promise you you will return a wiser and a poorer man, but with a
joyful heart regarding the capacity of the African to grow up.
Whether he does this by adding convolutions or piling on his gray
matter we will leave for the present.
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