They Do Not
Save People Out Of Surf On Abstract Moral Principles.
The African
at large is not an enthusiast on moral principles, and one and all
they'll let nature take its course if they don't feel keen on a man
surviving.
Half the African's ingratitude, although it may look very bad on
paper, is really not so very bad; for half the time you have been
asking him to be grateful to you for doing to, or giving him things
he does not care a row of pins about. I have quite his feelings,
for example, for half the things in civilised countries I am
expected to be glad to get. "Oh, how nice it must be to be able to
get about in cars, omnibuses and railway trains again!" Is it?
Well I don't think so, and I do not feel glad over it. Similarly,
we will take an African case of ingratitude. A white friend of mine
put himself to an awful lot of trouble to save the life of one of
his sub-traders who had had an accident, and succeeded. It had been
the custom of the man's wife to bring the trader little presents of
fowls, etc., from time to time, and some time after the accident he
met the lady and told her he had noticed a falling off in her
offerings and he thought her very ungrateful after what he had done
for her husband. She grunted and the next morning she brings in as
a present the most forlorn, skinny, one-and-a-half-feathered chicken
you ever laid eye on, and in answer to the trader's comments she
said: "Massa, fo sure them der chicken no be 'ticularly good
chicken, but fo sure dem der man no be 'ticularly good man. They
go" (they match each other).
I have referred at great length to the Krumen because of their
importance, and also because they are the natives the white men have
more to do with as servants than any other; but methods of getting
on with them are not necessarily applicable to dealing with other
forms of African labourers, such as plantation hands in the Congo
Francais, Angola, and Cameroon. In Cameroon the Germans are now
using largely the Batanga natives on the plantations; the Duallas,
the great trading tribe in Cameroon River, being too lazy to do any
heavy work; and they have also tried to import labourers from Togo
Land, but this attempt was not a success, ending in the revolt of
1894, which lost several white lives. The public work is carried
on, as it is in our own colonies, by the criminals in the chain-
gang. The Germans have had many accusations hurled against them by
people of their own nationality, but on the whole these "atrocities"
have been much exaggerated and only half understood; and certainly
have not amounted to anything like the things that have gone on in
the "philanthropic" Congo Free State. The food given out by the
German Government is the best Government rations given on the whole
West Coast.
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