However Good May Be The Outfit For Your Work That You Take With You,
You Will Have, At First, Great Difficulty In Realising That It Is
Possible For The People You Are Among Really To Believe Things In
The Way They Do.
And you cannot associate with them long before you
must recognise that these Africans have often a remarkable mental
acuteness and a large share of common sense; that there is nothing
really "child-like" in their form of mind at all.
Observe them
further and you will find they are not a flighty-minded, mystical
set of people in the least. They are not dreamers, or poets, and
you will observe, and I hope observe closely - for to my mind this is
the most important difference between their make of mind and our
own - that they are notably deficient in all mechanical arts: they
have never made, unless under white direction and instruction, a
single fourteenth-rate piece of cloth, pottery, a tool or machine,
house, road, bridge, picture or statue; that a written language of
their own construction they none of them possess. A careful study
of the things a man, black or white, fails to do, whether for good
or evil, usually gives you a truer knowledge of the man than the
things he succeeds in doing. When you fully realise this acuteness
on one hand and this mechanical incapacity on the other which exist
in the people you are studying, you can go ahead. Only, I beseech
you, go ahead carefully. When you have found the easy key that
opens the reason underlying a series of facts, as for example,
these: a Benga spits on your hand as a greeting; you see a man who
has been marching regardless through the broiling sun all the
forenoon, with a heavy load, on entering a village and having put
down his load, elaborately steal round in the shelter of the houses,
instead of crossing the street; you come across a tribe that cuts
its dead up into small pieces and scatters them broadcast, and
another tribe that thinks a white man's eye-ball is a most desirable
thing to be possessed of - do not, when you have found this key, drop
your collecting work, and go home with a shriek of "I know all about
Fetish," because you don't, for the key to the above facts will not
open the reason why it is regarded advisable to kill a person who is
making Ikung; or why you should avoid at night a cotton tree that
has red earth at its roots; or why combings of hair and paring of
nails should be taken care of; or why a speck of blood that may fall
from your flesh should be cut out of wood - if it has fallen on that-
-and destroyed, and if it has fallen on the ground stamped and
rubbed into the soil with great care. This set requires another key
entirely.
I must warn you also that your own mind requires protection when you
send it stalking the savage idea through the tangled forests, the
dark caves, the swamps and the fogs of the Ethiopian intellect.
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